The investment community has been buzzing with speculation that DeepSeek's new CFO will be Yan Wentao, a post-90s partner from Hillhouse Ventures, nearly a month after whispers first began circulating about the appointment.

While the position has not been officially finalized yet, many industry insiders are already treating the matter as settled. Over the past two months, several young partners from leading venture capital firms have also competed for the CFO role at DeepSeek.

Tracing back three years, when High-Flyer Quant decided to enter the large model space, the announcement poster carried an inspiring message about embracing ambition with sincerity and passion—an idealistic call that attracted many young talents to join DeepSeek.

In June this year, after completing its first round of financing, DeepSeek announced plans to at least double the size of all departments, with the recruitment notice including the crucial CFO position. Many believe DeepSeek's IPO is not far off, and with the company being valued at a potential trillion-yuan market capitalization, all eyes are on who will fill this important financial leadership role.

Even with a valuation reaching 500 billion yuan, DeepSeek remains an enigmatic company. When asking venture capital insiders about whether the CFO position has been filled, there's often a sense of distance—as if this is something too significant for outsiders to easily access.

DeepSeek began publicly recruiting for a CFO as early as February 2025, and as recently as June, the company was still posting financial team positions on its official website, including the CFO role. This timing coincides with DeepSeek's intensive fundraising period—after completing its first round of approximately 50 billion yuan with Liang Wenfeng personally contributing about 20 billion yuan, reports now suggest a second round is nearing completion with a valuation around 500 billion yuan.

As everyone knows, the CFO plays a vital role in a company's financing and capital operations. Compared to domestic peers in the large model space, DeepSeek's CFO appointment comes somewhat late. For instance, Xue Zizhao, the first Hillhouse investor to contact MiniMax, joined the company in 2023 as Vice President of Investment and Financing and Joint Company Secretary, directly managing capital market affairs. Similarly, Zhang Yutong, former Managing Partner at GSR Ventures, joined Moonshot AI in April 2024 as President, overseeing overall strategy and commercialization including financing.

"Investing well then creating" is an unspoken phenomenon in the venture capital circle—former investors joining portfolio companies, often taking on roles as capital operation strategists. Xue Zizhao at MiniMax and Zhang Yuan at Mixue Bingcheng both followed this path. Interestingly, both came from Hillhouse, which has earned a reputation as a "cradle for young CFOs."

The current CFO candidate for DeepSeek is also a young partner from Hillhouse: Yan Wentao. Born in 1991 and a graduate of Fudan University, Yan worked at Tencent Investment and H Capital between 2013 and 2020 before joining Hillhouse Ventures in 2020, where he became a representative post-90s investor. His investment portfolio includes projects in frontier technology companies such as MiniMax, Zhipu AI, ByteDance, J&T Express, and Webull.

"Others have also been interviewing for this position," a source at a leading institution told us in early September. Several young partners from top firms have participated in the CFO interviews at DeepSeek. Many in the industry believe that DeepSeek's CFO role is actually more appealing than a partner position at an investment firm.

Regardless, such a significant role at a unicorn of this valuation cannot remain low-profile nor simple. Earlier, when Liang Wenfeng discussed his approach to talent at High-Flyer, he emphasized individual capability, calling it "not necessarily the secret to success, but one of High-Flyer's cultural values."

The IPO may be approaching. Looking back to 2009, when Liang Wenfeng interned at a company founded by a Zhejiang University alumnus, he became a manager in the new technology department before graduating, earning 16,000 yuan per month. Upon leaving, the alumnus advised young Liang to find businesses with high gross margins—advice Liang remembered for years and later validated through High-Flyer and DeepSeek.

According to The Information, DeepSeek's overall gross margin for the first seven months of this year was 44.6%, with the API business achieving an impressive 82.9% gross margin. During this period, DeepSeek generated approximately 475 million yuan in revenue, a nearly tenfold increase compared to the full year of 2025, while net losses narrowed to 715 million yuan, significantly lower than the 935 million yuan loss recorded in 2025.

However, DeepSeek's spending has also intensified dramatically. In the first seven months of this year, the company spent approximately 11 billion yuan on AI infrastructure, including leasing AI chip servers and purchasing computing equipment. In contrast, the total for the full year of 2025 was only about 1.2 billion yuan—a nearly tenfold surge in just over a year.

DeepSeek is not alone in this spending surge. Industry-wide AI infrastructure expenditures are skyrocketing. The latest example is Zhipu, which completed a financing round of approximately 5 billion US dollars for next-generation GLM models, a fully self-trained system, and related computing infrastructure. Earlier, on August 23, Alibaba announced a placement of 710 million new shares to raise 80 billion Hong Kong dollars, with 100% of the net proceeds allocated to full-stack AI capabilities and infrastructure construction.

At this point, whether or not DeepSeek faces funding shortages on the road to AGI, an IPO appears to be a natural next step. As early as June 17, the Shanghai Stock Exchange announced support for high-quality AI large model companies that have not yet generated significant revenue to list on the STAR Market. With opportunities opening up, both Zhipu and MiniMax, which have already completed Hong Kong IPOs, are accelerating their STAR Market listing plans.

In September, news emerged that DeepSeek has begun preparing for an IPO targeting the STAR Market. In its second financing round, DeepSeek has brought in new investors, primarily industry-focused institutions such as Shixi Capital and SMIC Fund.

The large model competition in China has been intense for two to three years. Among the unlisted large model companies in China, DeepSeek founded by Liang Wenfeng and Moonshot AI's Kimi founded by Yang Zhilin are the two highest-valued—the latter reaching a pre-investment valuation of 50 billion US dollars in its latest round. These are two young men from Guangdong awaiting their IPOs. Perhaps soon, China's AI landscape will welcome a new trillion-yuan market capitalization company.