Liang Wenfeng is now the wealthiest founder in artificial intelligence, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which revalued his stake in DeepSeek on 13 July and added roughly $19bn to his fortune overnight.
His net worth is put at about $36bn, up from around $16.7bn, placing him above Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
The revaluation follows DeepSeek’s $7.4bn funding round in June, the Hangzhou lab’s first-ever outside raise, which lifted its valuation from about $10bn in April to roughly $50bn. Liang’s stake was diluted in the process, to somewhere around 78%. Dilution, at these numbers, is a pleasant sort of problem.
The ranking comes with a boundary drawn tightly around it. It counts only companies whose primary business and revenue come from AI models themselves, which excludes conglomerates and the AI supply chain, and therefore excludes the two men who would otherwise sit at the top of any such list by an embarrassing margin. Within those walls, Liang is first.
What makes the round worth a second look is not the size but the terms. Liang put in approximately $3bn of his own money, roughly 40% of the total, drawn from profits at High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund he co-founded in 2016 and out of which DeepSeek was spun in July 2023.The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
