DeepSeek is in talks to raise roughly $1.5 billion at about a $71 billion valuation and is preparing an IPO, targeted for 2027 but potentially as early as the end of 2026, according to a Bloomberg report dated July 14, 2026. The Chinese LLM developer, founded in 2023, closed its first outside funding round of over $7 billion about a month earlier at roughly a $50 billion valuation. Investors reportedly include Tencent and Beijing's National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. DeepSeek accounted for nearly 23% of tokens processed through Vercel's AI gateway in June, compared with 32% for Anthropic, and its cloud service runs on Huawei chips despite U.S. export controls. DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment.