DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng has become the wealthiest founder among companies whose core business is AI model development, with a net worth estimated at $36 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The figure represents a more than 115% increase from a previous estimate of approximately $16.7 billion.
The surge follows a $7.4 billion funding round closed in June that raised DeepSeek’s valuation roughly fivefold to $50 billion, up from $10 billion in April. Bloomberg estimates that Liang holds approximately 78% of the company, making his stake the primary driver of the valuation gain. DeepSeek did not respond to requests for comment.
Bloomberg’s comparison was limited to founders whose companies derive the majority of their revenue from AI model development, excluding diversified conglomerates such as Alibaba and Tencent, as well as infrastructure and chip companies.
Under that framework, Liang now ranks ahead of OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman at $25.5 billion and Anthropic founder Dario Amodei at $8 billion. Others in the top five include Zhipu founder Liu Debin at $11.6 billion and Minimax founder Yan Junjie at $2.2 billion. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was not included in the ranking. At $36 billion, Liang also ranks among the top eight wealthiest individuals in China.
Liang founded DeepSeek in 2023 as a spinoff from the AI division of his quantitative hedge fund, Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management. The company gained international attention in late 2024 and early 2025 when it released two AI models that matched the performance of leading Western systems at a fraction of the reported development cost, triggering a broad selloff in U.S. technology stocks and prompting questions about the scale of AI infrastructure spending by American companies.
