He is not an entrepreneur accustomed to the spotlight, yet today he is the richest artificial intelligence founder in the world. Thanks to the latest mega funding obtained by DeepSeek, Liang Wenfeng has seen his wealth grow to 36 billion dollars, surpassing Daniela and Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Greg Brockman of OpenAI. A result that reflects the rapid rise of the Chinese startup and the growing strategic importance of artificial intelligence in the country’s technological development.
THE OVERTAKE OF AMODEI AND BROCKMAN
The latest funding round of DeepSeek more than doubled the wealth of its founder Liang Wenfeng, raising it from about 16.7 billion to 36 billion dollars. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, this fortune makes him the richest among founders of companies specialized in developing artificial intelligence models, ahead of Anthropic co-founders Daniela and Dario Amodei, and Greg Brockman of OpenAI.
For the ranking, Bloomberg considered exclusively companies whose main activity and most of their revenues come directly from AI models, excluding diversified conglomerates like Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, as well as companies in the supply chain, such as semiconductor manufacturers and data center operators. With an estimated wealth of 36 billion dollars, Liang is also the eighth richest person in China, just behind Chen Tianshi, co-founder of Cambricon Technologies.
THE GROWTH OF DEEPSEEK
The growth of Liang’s personal fortune is closely linked to the expansion of DeepSeek. Investor demand, reports Bloomberg, has raised the company’s valuation from 10 billion dollars, estimated in April, to 50 billion after the 7.4 billion dollar fundraising round completed in June 2026. In the operation, Liang personally invested 3 billion dollars and, despite dilution, retains an estimated stake of around 78% of the company.
This very stake represents a distinctive element compared to the main founders in Silicon Valley. In the large US artificial intelligence companies, in fact, capital is generally distributed among numerous investors and co-founders, while Liang maintains a largely majority control of the startup.
FROM THE HIGH-FLYER FUND TO AI
Born in 1985 in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province, Liang studied electronic engineering and later information and communication engineering at Zhejiang University, where he began to deepen his knowledge of artificial intelligence. In 2016 he co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, which in a few years saw assets under management grow from 1 billion yuan in 2016 to over 10 billion in 2019 thanks to AI-based trading strategies.
In 2023 High-Flyer spun off DeepSeek as a laboratory dedicated to research on general artificial intelligence. The declared goal was to develop long-term basic research, promoting “an exploration driven by curiosity” rather than an exclusively profit-oriented approach.
THE ADVANTAGE OF CHIPS AND THE RISE OF THE STARTUP
As Startmag wrote at the beginning of last year, in the years before US export restrictions, High-Flyer had invested a significant part of its profits in purchasing Nvidia graphics processors and building computing infrastructures dedicated to artificial intelligence. The hedge fund declared it invested 200 million yuan in 2020 and 1 billion yuan in 2021 to build the AI Fire-Flyer clusters, while according to Chinese media it managed to accumulate over 10,000 Nvidia graphics processing units before the US bans came into effect.
Liang himself indicated what the main obstacle to the development of Chinese AI was: “The problem has never been money; the problem is the bans on shipments of advanced chips.”
THE GOAL: TO MOVE FROM IMITATION TO ORIGINALITY
DeepSeek attracted international attention at the beginning of 2025 by presenting a model with performance comparable to OpenAI’s at significantly lower costs. More recently, the company introduced the V4 model, declaring its compatibility with chips developed by Huawei Technologies.
Liang has repeatedly argued that China must emancipate itself from the role of follower in the artificial intelligence sector. “We realize that Chinese AI cannot remain forever in a chasing position. We often say there is a one or two year gap between China and the United States, but the real gap is between originality and imitation. If this does not change, China will always be a follower.” Consistent with this approach is also the motto chosen for the launch of DeepSeek in 2023: “Be wildly ambitious and sincere.”
