- GL Ventures partner Yan Wentao is expected to join DeepSeek as chief financial officer, sources say
- The appointment comes after DeepSeek’s first major external funding round and as it prepares for a potential STAR Market listing
DeepSeek, one of China’s leading large language models, is set to hire Yan Wentao (严文韬), a partner at GL Ventures (高瓴创投), as its chief financial officer, according to multiple independent sources familiar with the matter.
Yan, born in 1991 and a graduate of Fudan University, joined GL Ventures in 2020 and has since become one of the firm’s younger partners.
His investment portfolio includes ByteDance, Zhipu AI, MiniMax, Xiaohongshu and J&T Express.
Yan also participated in GL Ventures’ investment in MiniMax, one of DeepSeek’s major domestic competitors in the large-language-model market.
Why a CFO, and why now?
The appointment would mark one of DeepSeek’s most significant senior hires outside its core tech team since the firm was founded.
For most of its first three years, DeepSeek largely avoided external fundraising and kept a low profile in consumer-facing business, with founder Liang Wenfeng (梁文锋) focused on developing artificial general intelligence. That approach began to change this year.
DeepSeek raised about 51 billion yuan ($7.6 billion) in its first external funding round in June, with Liang personally investing about 20 billion yuan. Tencent, CATL, JD.com and NetEase were among the investors.
Just over a month later, the company began raising another round at a reported pre-money valuation of about 500 billion yuan, putting the combined size of the two fundraising rounds at more than 100 billion yuan.
Reuters reported last week that DeepSeek had selected CITIC Securities to prepare for a potential STAR Market IPO, with a filing possible this year and a listing targeted for 2027.
From AI lab to public company
A CFO typically becomes increasingly important as a company moves toward an IPO, particularly for managing financial reporting, corporate governance, shareholder relations and disclosure requirements.
Yan’s investment background spans platform companies such as ByteDance, consumer businesses such as Xiaohongshu and AI model makers including Zhipu and MiniMax — areas that overlap with the challenges DeepSeek now faces as it moves beyond its research-focused origins.
A person close to DeepSeek said Liang wanted a CFO born in the 1990s. Industry insiders said the role’s appeal comes partly from DeepSeek’s position in AI and partly from the scale of its imminent capital-markets ambitions.
If Yan joins, his appointment would provide another indication that DeepSeek is moving into a new phase: from a tightly focused AI research operation toward a heavily funded company preparing for commercialization and potentially a public listing.
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