Atlas / Open-weight and challenger labs / DeepSeek
DeepSeek
AI Market Atlas · by Pro Pluribus
China
V4 and V4.1, the price-setter for open frontier models. Raised about $15B (22 Oct, led by Tencent and CATL) at ~$75B pre-money, days after US civilian agencies were ordered to remove its AI.
R2 never shipped; reasoning is built into V4's Thinking mode. Preparing a Shanghai STAR Market listing with CITIC Securities; revenue reportedly about $1B a year †.
What it offers
Main offerings
- DeepSeek V4-Pro / V4-Flash
- 1M-token context, MIT license. V4.1-Flash (10 Sep) is multimodal and outperforms V4-Pro.
- DeepSeek app and API
- Very low-cost API, compatible with OpenAI- and Anthropic-style calls.
Recent news
- DeepSeek reportedly raises about $15BOne of China's largest rounds, two days after US agencies were told to remove its AI.TechCrunch ↗
- DeepSeek nears a $12B+ pre-IPO round led by Tencent and CATLThe raise grew from about 50B to 80B+ yuan, with a listing targeted for early 2027.Bloomberg ↗
- CEO tells investors Huawei chip training is a top betIts next models depend on Chinese chips rather than Nvidia, a test of whether China can train frontier models on domestic hardwareAI Weekly ↗
- DeepSeek reportedly raising about $7.4B at about $75B, IPO eyedDeepSeek's first big outside raise would make it one of the most valuable AI labs outside the USBig Hat Group ↗
- DeepSeek plans order of 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips for new data centerCould become one of the largest known Huawei AI chip clusters, advancing China's move away from NvidiaBloomberg ↗
- DeepSeek V4-Pro reaches general release with agent focusThe flagship leaves preview across app and API, built for tool use and multi-step agent workQuartz ↗
- Cheap new DeepSeek coding model speeds the AI price warCoding performance reported near Claude Opus 4.8 at a fraction of the price, pushing prices down across the marketAxios ↗
- DeepSeek V4 preview ships as open-weight Pro and Flash modelsLong-awaited flagship with much longer context, released openly on Hugging Face and the APIMIT Technology Review ↗
This map is a by-product of the work. Keeping track of what each of these actually does, and which ones are worth your time, is part of how I advise founder-led companies on AI. If you want that applied to your business, the first conversation is free.
Book a 30-minute conversation →Compiled from public sources by Pro Pluribus; updated 10 Nov 2026. General information, not advice. Company names and logos belong to their owners and are used to identify them, without affiliation or endorsement. Terms