DeepSeek’s second funding round now has a size, a valuation and most of an investor list. According to IT之家 and Sina/Kuai Keji, both citing The Information and two people familiar with the deal, DeepSeek raised ¥105.5bn from nearly 30 investors at a valuation above ¥615.5bn. The Information puts it at nearly $16bn. When we covered the close on 23 October, only Tencent and CATL had been named. The 30 October reports fill in the rest.
Who put in what
- Tencent: ¥10bn, the same as in the first round, so ¥20bn in total.
- CATL and its chairman Robin Zeng: ¥10bn combined, double the ¥5bn they put into round one.
- China Mobile and CITIC Securities: new, at ¥8bn each. CITIC is also reported to be preparing DeepSeek’s possible STAR Market IPO.
- China Telecom, CICC and China Life are also in. State-linked investors supplied 27% of the round on The Information’s count.
- Chipmakers: CXMT (with founder Zhu Yiming) and SMIC are new.
- Consumer and platform companies: vivo, Meituan, Midea, Luxshare, Geely, Trip.com and Xiaohongshu, at ¥1bn–3bn each.
- Funds: Lis Capital (founded by ex-Sequoia China partner Cao Xi) put in ¥7.5bn this round against ¥3bn in round one. IDG has put in ¥6.5bn across both rounds and Boyu ¥3.5bn.
The first round in June raised about ¥51bn. The target for this one started at ¥50bn and was raised more than once; Caijing reported ¥100bn on 13 October.
The detail search people should notice
One line in the report stands out to me. An investor source says DeepSeek asked prospective backers to submit written explanations of what data support and business synergy they could provide. Look at who got in on that basis:
- Meituan, with local merchants, menus, prices and reviews.
- Trip.com, with hotels, flights and travel content.
- Xiaohongshu, China’s biggest lifestyle notes and recommendation platform.
- vivo, with devices and default distribution.
- China Mobile and China Telecom, with carriers and distribution.
Those are exactly the vertical datasets the open web doesn’t give you, and DeepSeek now runs its own search and fetch stack. Nobody has confirmed any data deal, so this is inference, not fact. But the selection criterion points that way.
Two other DeepSeek developments
- Billing started on 31 October. Search and Fetch calls made through third-party harnesses such as Claude Code and Codex have been billed since 00:00 Beijing time on 1 November, which was 16:00 GMT on 31 October, at $0.75 (¥5) per 1,000 successful calls, according to DeepSeek’s pricing page. Tencent Cloud’s TokenHub passed the same charge on to pay-as-you-go customers from the same moment, with its TokenPlan packages following on 18 November. On 30 October Baidu answered with a promotional ¥4.9 per 1,000 calls for its search AI API, pitched explicitly as cheaper than DeepSeek.
- A gated “Cyber” model. IT之家 reports that developers found front-end code on DeepSeek’s site for a security-specific API. It has two model IDs (cyber-personal-v3 and cyber-enterprise-v4) and a separate Cyber Key, and access needs real-name verification, a mainland phone number and face checks. DeepSeek hasn’t announced it, and it is only visible to a small grey-test group.
My take
I don’t care much about the valuation itself. What matters is that a model company with its own index is buying its way into China’s richest closed datasets, while pricing search per call for agents. If DeepSeek answers draw on Meituan and Xiaohongshu data, then brand visibility in DeepSeek runs through those platforms as much as through your website. Measure your presence there.