William Liang expressed dissatisfaction with the 4-hour internal speech leak, and DeepSeek announced the suspension of its second round of funding.

BlockBeats News, July 25th, according to Bloomberg, DeepSeek has announced the suspension of its second-round financing and verbally notified some potential investors that it will not sign the investment agreement as expected. This suspension was partly due to founder Liang Wenfeng's dissatisfaction with the leak of a 4-hour internal transcript during its first financing transaction, where he made 52 statements during an investor meeting, involving DeepSeek's organizational culture, open-source logic, technical roadmap, and views on the industry's competitive landscape. The nearly 4-hour meeting recording has recently flooded social media, including statements such as "the biggest gap in AI between China and the U.S. is computing power". DeepSeek and Liang Wenfeng have not confirmed the authenticity of the leaked records.

DeepSeek stated that it may still choose to resume the trading process in the future and has begun preparations for an initial public offering (IPO), which could be filed as early as later this year.

DeepSeek completed its first external financing round in June 2026, raising over 50 billion RMB, approximately $7.4 billion, with a post-investment valuation of about $50-59 billion. It adopted a special structure, with most of the funds entering a limited partnership managed by Liang Wenfeng. Investors have no voting rights and a 5-year lock-up period. Liang Wenfeng himself contributed about 20 billion RMB as the largest contributor, with investments from Tencent, CATL, JD.com, NetEase, and the China National AI Fund, among others. Subsequently, DeepSeek initiated discussions for a second round of financing in mid-July, with a target valuation of around $71 billion.