Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek has reportedly tapped investment and brokerage giant CITIC Securities to prepare for an initial public offering (IPO) on Shanghai’s tech-focused STAR Market.
While the Hangzhou-based company aims to begin the IPO process in 2026, details about the timing of its market debut, the amount DeepSeek wants to raise, and its target valuation have not yet emerged.
DeepSeek seeks fresh capital to fund computing infrastructure, model development, and talent retention and recruitment amid intensifying competition among leading Chinese and American AI firms.
DeepSeek is already undertaking a funding round that would value it at 500 billion yuan (USD 75 billion), as per the Reuters estimates.
The startup raised about USD 7.4 billion in June at a post-money valuation of over USD 50 billion. During that time, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng personally committed 20 billion yuan, while Tencent Holdings and battery company CATL chipped in 10 billion yuan and 5 billion yuan, respectively, to become the largest external shareholders.
Founder Liang hopes the IPO proceeds will help DeepSeek offer stronger incentives to retain key staff and researchers, as the company recently lost some of its in-house talents to better-funded rivals, including ByteDance and Xiaomi.
DeepSeek’s IPO push comes as rivals, domestic and global, are rushing to the public markets for funding amid rising costs of competing in AI, which requires large amounts of computing power, data center capacity, and engineering talent.
Chinese large language model (LLM) developers Z.AI and MiniMax went public in Hong Kong in 2026. Beijing-based startup Moonshot has also filed confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO.
In a funding round, it received a valuation of USD 50 billion, falling short of DeepSeek and Z.AI. Talking about Z.AI, the latter has a market capitalisation of approximately USD 54 billion.
However, the valuations of Chinese tech startups have remained way lower than those sought by their American rivals.
Claude and the Mythos developer Anthropic could be valued at up to USD 2 trillion in its IPO, while OpenAI could be valued at up to USD 1 trillion in a planned offering.
Anthropic is planning to launch the offering in mid-October and complete the listing before the midterm elections in November.