The Chinese company plans to appoint Yan Wentao, a partner at GL Ventures, as its first chief financial officer and has hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market.
DeepSeek is taking steps to move beyond being one of the artificial intelligence laboratories that has most disrupted the global technology landscape and become a company ready for capital markets. The Chinese company plans to appoint Yan Wentao, a partner at venture capital firm GL Ventures, as its first chief financial officer as it works toward a potential Shanghai IPO.
The appointment, first reported by Reuters citing two sources familiar with the company’s plans, has not yet been officially announced. Its significance goes beyond the addition of a new executive: DeepSeek has not previously had a chief financial officer, and creating the role would strengthen key functions for a company planning to list, including investor relations, financial controls, capital allocation, and disclosure requirements.
The move comes just days after another step in the same direction became known. DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market, the technology-focused board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
From a founder-funded lab to a company with outside investors
DeepSeek was founded in 2023 under the leadership of Liang Wenfeng and was financed during its early years by High-Flyer, the quantitative fund also founded by the Chinese entrepreneur. That structure initially allowed the company to focus on research and the development of artificial intelligence models without relying on the conventional funding model of a technology startup.
The situation has changed as DeepSeek has grown and international competition to develop more advanced models has multiplied its capital needs. The company began seeking outside funding this year and is increasing investment in computing infrastructure, chip development, and the recruitment and retention of specialists.
Reuters said DeepSeek is currently raising a new funding round that would value it at about 500 billion yuan, or roughly $74 billion. In June, it raised approximately $7.4 billion at a post-money valuation of more than $50 billion.
A potential IPO would provide another avenue for financing a technology race that requires ever-larger amounts of capital, particularly because of the cost of data centers, advanced processors, and specialized talent.
Yan Wentao, a venture capital background
The executive selected to take on this new stage would be Yan Wentao, currently a partner at GL Ventures, the venture capital arm of Hillhouse Investment.
Yan has experience in investments and corporate transactions and has participated, among others, in investments related to artificial intelligence companies. They include MiniMax, another Chinese company competing in the development of generative models.
His arrival would add to DeepSeek’s management structure an executive with close ties to capital markets at precisely the time the company is beginning to engage with outside investors and consider a stock market listing.
Hillhouse, GL Ventures’ parent company, is not currently an investor in DeepSeek, according to Reuters.
The STAR Market, an option for listing in China
The preparations are focused on Shanghai’s STAR Market, created in 2019 to facilitate capital-market access for companies tied to technology and strategic sectors.
Reuters reported on September 9 that DeepSeek had hired CITIC Securities to work on preparations for a potential IPO. Sources cited at the time said the company intends to begin the process this year, although neither the size of the deal nor the valuation it might command in a potential market debut has yet been determined.
For now, therefore, no IPO has been formally announced. The known moves—the hiring of a specialized financial intermediary and the creation of the chief financial officer role—nonetheless show that DeepSeek is building the structure needed to undertake that process.
The AI race is also being fought through capital
The potential listing comes at a time when competition among artificial intelligence developers has ceased to be solely technological. Training new models, building computing capacity, and securing chip supplies require companies to mobilize ever-greater amounts of capital.
DeepSeek became one of the international players in that race after showing that a Chinese company could develop competitive models using a cost and resource strategy different from that of the major U.S. labs.
Since then, the company has continued expanding its portfolio. On September 10, it introduced DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, the smallest member of its new model architecture, designed to improve inference speed, performance, and scalability.
That growth now requires DeepSeek to address a different question from the one that defined its early years: how to finance its expansion without losing its ability to compete technologically.
The planned appointment of its first chief financial officer and the work begun with CITIC Securities point to one possible answer. DeepSeek is evolving from a structure funded essentially by its founder into a company open to outside capital and prepared to meet the financial and transparency requirements of public markets.
The IPO has not yet been decided. But the steps taken in recent weeks bring the Chinese company closer to a change that would matter not only for DeepSeek, but also for China’s growing artificial intelligence industry.
