DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan, or about $12bn, in a new funding round, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.

Tencent and the battery maker CATL have committed some of the largest sums, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg.

The Chinese AI lab had first set out to raise about 50 billion yuan. Demand grew after the launch of its latest model, Bloomberg said, and the final total could approach 100 billion yuan.

DeepSeek has not announced the round. At these levels, it would top the company’s first outside funding earlier this year. That round raised about 50 billion yuan at a valuation of $52bn to $59bn.

Founder Liang Wenfeng was the largest investor in that first round, putting in about 20 billion yuan of his own money. Tencent added roughly 10 billion yuan and CATL about 5 billion yuan, alongside JD.com, NetEase and China’s national AI investment fund.

Those same two backers now lead the new round. Tencent runs the WeChat messaging app and a large cloud business. CATL makes batteries for electric cars and is working on solid-state batteries.

For Tencent, becoming more closely associated with DeepSeek could enable it to keep up with its domestic competitors. This was reported by Reuters in June when the first round of the comparison was being prepared.

Last month, Reuters reported that DeepSeek had secured CITIC Securities to prepare for a possible initial public offering on Shanghai’s STAR Market, a market board for technology companies.

However, they said that the timing, valuation and scale of the listing had not yet been determined.

DeepSeek originated from High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund which Liang set up. The laboratory attracted widespread attention around the beginning of 2025 due to its R1 open-source model and launched its V4 models this year.