By Kane Wu, Yantoultra Ngui and Eduardo Baptista
HONG KONG, Oct 22 (Reuters) - Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan ($14.98 billion) in its latest funding round from investors including chipmaker GigaDevice, food delivery company Meituan and automaker Geely, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
Battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) and WeChat operator Tencent Holdings, both existing shareholders, were among the biggest investors in the round,
said two of the people.
Home appliances maker Midea and existing shareholder NetEase also participated, the people said.
Other investors include Boyu Capital, CPE and Legend Capital, as well as existing shareholder IDG Capital, three of the people said.
The total number of investors in the funding round exceeded 15, one of the people said.
DeepSeek, which sources have said is valued at 500 billion yuan before new capital is injected, will have doubled its original fundraising target of 50 billion yuan. The rise underscores strong interest from investors - many backed by the state and big corporations - as China aims to stay competitive in the AI race against the US.
"It's encouraging to see such a high valuation for DeepSeek, showing the confidence from investors on the future of its open source strategies," said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia.
"Given that they (the investors) are all Chinese and critical component supply chain vendors, I can see DeepSeek itself becoming a key part of these domestic tech supply chains," Su said.
The fundraising is set to be complete in the coming days, but financial details and the investor lineup are not ironclad and could still change, a second person said.
DeepSeek could not be immediately reached for comment. Geely declined to comment. The other firms mentioned in this article did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Thursday, Bloomberg first reported, citing sources, that DeepSeek had raised $15 billion in the latest funding round, with CATL and Tencent as its main backers.
DeepSeek's fundraising outcome comes amid growing concerns over massive AI spending that triggered a new selloff in global tech stock this month.
The soured sentiment has led to delays or withdrawals of data center IPOs and poor market debuts of AI-related companies in South Korea and Hong Kong, Reuters has reported.
Shares of Z.AI and MiniMax, two large language model developers listed in Hong Kong since January, have fallen sharply from their peaks earlier this year.
After the fundraising, DeepSeek is getting closer to tapping public markets. In September, Reuters reported that the company aimed to kick off its IPO process this year and had hired CITIC Securities to prepare for the potential STAR Market float.
Last month, the company released its latest model, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, which it said was designed for greater capability, faster inference, higher throughput and scaling to larger models.
The Hangzhou-based firm raised $7.4 billion from its inaugural external funding round in June, Reuters has reported.
Filings by two Chinese investors in July suggested DeepSeek was valued at 350.88 billion yuan, or around $52 billion, in the June fundraising.
($1 = 6.6749 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Kane Wu and Yantoultra Ngui in Hong Kong and Eduardo Baptista in Beijing; additional reporting by Devika Nair in Bengaluru, Zhang Yan and Casey Hall in Shanghai and the Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Ronojoy Mazumdar and Thomas Derpinghaus)
