DeepSeek founder targets China’s IPO boom with quant strategies

The man behind China’s most talked-about AI lab has a side hustle, and it involves betting big on the country’s hottest tech IPOs. Liang Wenfeng, who founded DeepSeek and built it into a genuine competitor to OpenAI, is now steering his quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer toward a new mission: capturing value in China’s turbulent IPO market before the rest of the crowd shows up. From AI trading to IPO hunting Liang co-founded High-Flyer Quant around 2015-2016, building it into one of China’s most successful quantitative funds. At its peak, the firm managed somewhere between $8B and $13B in assets, powered by AI-driven trading strategies. Now, that same infrastructure is being redirected. In 2026, High-Flyer and its affiliated entities secured roughly $26 million in pre-IPO allocations for CXMT, a Chinese memory chipmaker. The fund also made smaller bets on Unitree Robotics, a company riding China’s push into humanoid and industrial robotics. DeepSeek cuts the cord In June 2026, DeepSeek completed a $7.4 billion external funding round that valued the company at approximately $52 billion. Liang himself contributed around 20 billion yuan, roughly $3 billion, to that round. The fundrais...