Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd.

DeepSeek, formally Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., is a Chinese AI research company founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and headquartered in Hangzhou, China. The company operates as a subsidiary of High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund also co-founded by Liang Wenfeng, which provides its primary funding.

DeepSeek develops and releases large language models under an open-source license, most notably the DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 models. DeepSeek-R1, released in January 2025, drew significant attention for reportedly achieving performance comparable to leading Western models at substantially lower training costs. The company publishes its model weights publicly, allowing external developers and researchers to download and deploy the models independently.

DeepSeek is wholly funded by High-Flyer rather than through external venture rounds, making it effectively bootstrapped from an institutional perspective. The January 2025 release of DeepSeek-R1 prompted widespread discussion in the AI industry about compute efficiency and cost structures, and briefly affected the stock prices of several U.S. semiconductor and AI infrastructure companies. The company maintains a research-focused structure with a relatively small headcount compared to its Western counterparts.