Liang Wenfeng is now the richest inventor in artificial intelligence, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which updated his stake in DeepSeek on July 13 and added nearly $19 billion to his fortune overnight.
His net worth is estimated at $36bn, up from $16.7bn, which puts him ahead of Anthropic founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
The update follows DeepSeek’s $7.4bn funding round in June, the Hangzhou-based lab’s first ever raise, which boosted its valuation from $10bn in April to nearly $50bn. Liang’s stake was diluted in the process, reaching around 78%. Dilution, in these numbers, is kind of a fun problem.
The level comes with a strongly drawn border around it. It only lists companies whose main business and revenue comes from AI models themselves, excluding conglomerates and the AI supply chain, thus excluding two men who would sit at the top of any such list by a shameful margin. Within those walls, Liang is the first.
What makes a cycle deserve a second look is not size but goals. Liang invested about $3bn of his money, about 40% of the total, from the profits of High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund he co-founded in 2016 and spun off DeepSeek in July 2023.
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It is the type of term sheet that can clear a room in general. Instead the round was reportedly oversubscribed, which tells you something about which currency is willing to tolerate when the other is not at all in the deal. An unusual structure was seen when the height was closed, and it has not been unusual since.
Reported cycle rates have changed. Figures of between $45bn and $59bn range, depending on whether the number quoted is for pre-funding, post-funding, or floating targets for prospective backers; Bloomberg index calculations use $50bn. Beijing’s state-backed funds were among the participants, making the valuation as much a strategic statement as a financial one.
Liang has already said what this money is for. He told potential investors that the lab is pursuing general artificial intelligence as its primary goal and will continue to release readily available models rather than chasing the next commercial, a strategy that’s easier to maintain when its backers can’t afford it.
The comparison with their American counterparts is especially instructive in how bad a map they have. Amodei and Brockman hold little equity in companies with many outside investors, complex governance, and, in OpenAI’s case, a lengthy legal history in federal court, including Brockman’s journals.
Liang is the owner of a large company that never took any foreign money until this year, and he still hasn’t responded to the person who wrote the check.
He’s been on this track since January 2025, when DeepSeek’s R1 model arrived with enough power to take billions of dollars out of US tech stocks in a day and turn the little-known Hangzhou stock into a national one. At that time, Forbes put his fortune at half of the current estimate.
Ratings still vary widely, and not just because of DeepSeek. High-Flyer, the source of Liang’s capital, holds about $8bn in assets according to data provider Preqin, and Forbes values his share of the fund at a fraction of what the Bloomberg index now says it is related to him.
One Hong Kong paper sums up the state of the art with the headline DeepSeek’s founders are worth $1bn or $150bn, depending on who you ask.
Numbers like these are inference, not fact. No one has sold a share in DeepSeek for $50bn in the public market, and the index figure is based on a private round with a number of investors who did not accept management rights to enter.
