DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng has become the world’s richest AI startup founder after the company’s latest fundraising round lifted his estimated fortune to $36 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth had previously been estimated at $16.7 billion.
The jump follows DeepSeek’s debut external funding round in June, when the company raised more than $7.4 billion at a valuation of about $50 billion. Bloomberg said Liang personally invested about $3 billion in that round,
The new estimate places Liang ahead of OpenAI president Greg Brockman, whose stake is valued at about $25.5 billion, and Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, whose holdings are estimated at about $8 billion, according to the reported figures. The Bloomberg profile says Liang is the founder of DeepSeek, which is developing open-source models to compete with rivals such as ChatGPT.
DeepSeek’s rise has been rapid. Liang, who also built his fortune through the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management, used profits from that business to launch DeepSeek in 2023. The company drew global attention in January 2025 with its R1 model, which was presented as comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost.
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