DeepSeek is moving to appoint its first chief financial officer ahead of an initial public offering.

Cryptopolitan, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Sunday that DeepSeek is considering Yen Wen-tao (옌원타오), a partner at GL Ventures under Hillhouse Investment, as its inaugural CFO.

The move comes as DeepSeek steps up external fundraising and IPO preparations. Yen is expected to oversee investor relations and overall financial management. Since its founding in 2023, DeepSeek has kept its distance from the traditional venture capital cycle. Its founder has run the company with money from the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer and only this year began seeking outside investment.

The reasons for pursuing a listing are clear. DeepSeek has expanded its market share with low-cost, high-performance models, but chips, computing infrastructure and securing key talent require large sums. An IPO could raise funds for such investment and could also serve as a way to pressure U.S. rivals.

Work on the listing is already under way. DeepSeek has selected underwriters including CITIC Securities and is reported to be seeking a listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market, with a plan to enter listing procedures within this year. It is also raising pre-IPO funding, with a target valuation of about 500 billion yuan.

In the current funding round, DeepSeek expects to raise 50 billion yuan. It previously raised $7.4 billion in June, and its valuation at the time of signing the term sheet was estimated at about 450 billion yuan. The final valuation, however, was adjusted to 350 billion yuan. Tencent, CATL and a number of private investors participated in the investment. Hillhouse itself, however, was not included in the list of DeepSeek investors.

The regulatory environment is also becoming more favorable. In June, the Shanghai Stock Exchange issued guidelines on the fifth listing standard applied to large-model companies. Companies seeking a listing must prove they already operate a widely used model. The exchange acknowledged the sector requires massive investment in computing power and specialist personnel.

DeepSeek’s IPO push is drawing attention for more than capital market issues. The company’s core competitiveness is price. Juniper Research estimated that the operating costs of Chinese AI models could be up to 90 percent lower than leading U.S. alternatives. That is a sensitive factor for companies seeking to cut costs tied to reliance on large Western data centers.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash was presented as an example of that strategy. The model’s cached input fee is around $0.003, far lower than GPT-5.6 Sol’s $0.40 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 at $0.50. Low-cost models have long been seen as struggling to match top-performing products, but the gap is narrowing quickly. Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index calculated that, as of March 2026, the top U.S. model was only 2.7 percent ahead of China’s top model. It also noted that in several evaluations since early 2025, the two countries’ model rankings have swapped.

Companies’ adoption decisions are also shifting toward cost rather than performance alone. Airbnb and Siemens are reviewing the adoption of Chinese technology, and Thomson Reuters has chosen Alibaba’s Qwen for document review work instead of Claude. Some assessments say U.S.-centered approaches still lead in the most complex tasks, but the spread of alternatives is accelerating.

As a result, DeepSeek’s IPO is being seen as a test bed for an AI profitability contest that goes beyond a domestic listing event in China. If DeepSeek secures IPO funding on top of its low-cost edge, competition over model pricing and infrastructure investment could intensify further. The market is expected to watch how quickly DeepSeek deploys the funds it raises into chips, computing infrastructure and talent, and whether the Shanghai listing process actually begins this year.