AI Wunderkind DeepSeek’s Founder Debuts On China’s 100 Richest List
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Liang Wenfeng. VCG via Getty Images This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of China’s Richest 2025. See the full list here. Chinese AI firm DeepSeek rattled the world in January when it released its low-cost AI model, R1, that was developed at a fraction of the cost of incumbent rivals such as OpenAI’s GPT. As tech stocks went into a free fall, the dark horse company’s founder, 40-year-old Liang Wenfeng, was catapulted into the billionaires club. He now joins the ranks of China’s 100 richest for the first time with an $11.5 billion fortune, based largely on his stake in the privately held firm, which Forbes values at an estimated $15 billion. So far, DeepSeek hasn’t tapped external investors and has been funded mostly by Liang’s other venture, quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, which he set up a decade ago. Analysts and VC investors from China and the U.S. estimate that DeepSeek could be worth between 5% and 10% of the $300 billion valuation OpenAI achieved in a March funding round led by Japan’s SoftBank. Although the American AI giant is widely reported to have hit a valuation of $500 billion when employees sold shares in October to an investor consortium that included Thrive Capital and T. Rowe Price, the valuation based on its March funding round serves as a better benchmark for DeepSeek, says Alex Platt, Portland-based research analyst at financial services firm D.A. Davidson. Unlike OpenAI, which launched its advanced GPT-5 model in August, DeepSeek has yet to launch a next-generation model and has so far only released incremental updates to its current models. Moreover, add analysts, commercialization has been slow, with the Chinese company’s estimated sales being only a fraction of OpenAI’s reported $12 billion in annualized sales last year, says Platt. (DeepSeek and High-Flyer didn’t respond…
