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The open-weight frontier lab that trains state-of-the-art models at a fraction of the cost
HQ: Hangzhou, China | Founded: 2023 | Employees: ~300 (2025); ~550-600 by mid-2026 per press | Stage: Bootstrapped subsidiary of High-Flyer (no external VC) | Website: https://deepseek.com
DeepSeek (深度求索, literally deep pursuit) is an artificial-intelligence research company founded on July 17 2023 in Hangzhou by Liang Wenfeng, who also co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2015. It is financed exclusively by High-Flyer and its AI-compute subsidiary, with no external venture capital (an arrangement Liang actively keeps). The lab builds open-weight foundation models and runs its own app, API, and research line: DeepSeek-Coder, DeepSeek-Math, DeepSeek-VL and Janus-Pro multimodal models, the DeepSeek-V3 general assistant (Dec 26 2024), the DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model (Jan 20 2025), DeepResearch and DeepSearch tools, DeepSeek-OCR, API, and the 2026 R2 line. V3 and R1.open and R2 regulations. Its training fleet is High-Flyer's Vero supercomputer cluster, one of the
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