Liang Wenfeng: DeepSeek founder becomes world’s richest AI startup founder
RNA illustration for representation.
New Delhi: DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng has become the world’s richest AI startup founder. His net worth climbed to $36 billion from about $16.7 billion, after his company raised $7.4 billion in a funding round in June 2026.
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup that develops large language models, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Liang founded the company in 2023 as a spin-off from his hedge fund’s AI division.
Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management, the hedge fund behind DeepSeek, was set up years earlier with two university classmates. Liang and his co-founders had first started trading together as students during the 2008 global financial crisis, before eventually building High-Flyer into a successful quantitative hedge fund. Before DeepSeek launched, the fund had invested heavily in advanced graphics processing units, giving the company significant computing power ahead of tighter US export restrictions on such chips to China.
DeepSeek gained global attention in early 2025 after releasing an AI model that reportedly matched the performance of leading American systems, but at a fraction of the cost. The release challenged the assumption that only well-funded US firms could build cutting-edge AI.
The June funding round valued DeepSeek at $50 billion, five times its reported $10 billion valuation in April. Liang reportedly invested $3 billion of his own money in the round, and the surge in value now puts him ahead of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman in Bloomberg’s ranking of AI-focused founders.
Liang is estimated to still own about 78% of DeepSeek, according to Bloomberg. This is an unusually high stake, since most founders see heavy dilution with each funding round. Bloomberg’s ranking only counts companies whose main revenue comes from AI models, which is why Alibaba and Tencent aren’t on it, and the figures themselves remain estimates based on a private funding round rather than public trading.
Liang was born in 1985 in China’s Guangdong province. He went on to study electronic engineering at Zhejiang University. He is now among China’s richest people, ranking eighth, just behind Chen Tianshi, the Cambricon Technologies co-founder who built his wealth in AI hardware.
