Catenaa, Friday, April 17, 2026- Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is in talks to raise at least $300 million at a valuation of $10 billion.
According to The Information, the fundraiser would mark the first time DeepSeek has sought outside capital.
Before this round, approaches from prominent Chinese venture capital firms and major tech companies had all been rebuffed, The Information reported.
The Information noted that DeepSeek’s Chinese origins could give pause to potential backers in the United States. DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters, which said it could not verify the report.
This move reflects a larger challenge in the AI industry. Developing and maintaining advanced models, especially as they become more capable, demands significant financial resources.
DeepSeek drew international attention after its low-cost models briefly matched the performance of leading American AI systems in early 2025, rattling stock markets and prompting scrutiny of the assumptions underlying US AI investment.
As of March 2026, the gap between the top US model and its best Chinese competitor stood at just 2.7 percentage points, according to Stanford University’s annual AI Index report.
DeepSeek rocked the tech sector last year when it claimed to develop a model nearly as powerful as ChatGPT or Claude but with only a fraction of the computing costs.
However, its market share has rapidly declined over the past 12 months. In April 2025, DeepSeek held 10% of the daily average user market share among chatbots, according to a tracker by Apptopia. However, that had declined to 3.3% by March 2026.
DeepSeek’s relationship with US chipmakers has been a separate point of tension.
Earlier Reuters reporting found that DeepSeek had withheld its primary model from US chip companies seeking to optimize its performance, and that hardware from Nvidia subject to export restrictions had been used to train one of its recent models.
Separately, Beijing has made reducing dependence on foreign chips a priority, steering companies toward homegrown semiconductor alternatives.
