China’s DeepSeek plans to double staff across all departments

[HONG KONG] China’s DeepSeek, fresh off agreements for a blockbuster fundraising, said that it is working to at least double the size of all departments, as it steps up efforts to compete with domestic rivals and global leaders such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.

The Hangzhou-based company disclosed the hiring push covering technical and engineering roles in a statement on WeChat, the country’s popular messaging platform. The announcement comes as DeepSeek is in the final stages of raising about 50 billion yuan (S$9.5 billion) in one of China’s largest startup financings, Bloomberg News reported earlier this month.

“As technology evolves, we are striving to at least double the size of all departments,” the company said in its post.

DeepSeek marked the emergence of China’s artificial intelligence competitors at the start of last year with a breakthrough reasoning model purportedly developed at a fraction of the cost of its Silicon Valley rivals. The secretive company has since unveiled additional services, while Chinese competitors from Alibaba to MiniMax have introduced their own competitive services.

DeepSeek has not disclosed the number of its employees, though media reports put it at less than 200 last year.

The success of DeepSeek and other low-cost Chinese models raised concerns about the sustainability of spending on the AI accelerators from the world’s most valuable company.

Chinese companies are grabbing an increasing share of the AI market, according to a report from research firm Exponential View. The report shows more users are tapping open-weight and Chinese AI models, including DeepSeek and MiniMax.

Data from OpenRouter, a platform that gives developers access to multiple AI models, shows the share of tokens requested from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic models fell to 33 per cent in June 2026 from 72 per cent a year earlier.

DeepSeek’s fundraising may enable the company to become even more aggressive in marketing its AI services globally. External investors in the latest funding round, which include Tencent and the state-backed National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, will put in some 30 billion yuan at a valuation of roughly 350 billion yuan, Bloomberg reported.

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Liang Wenfeng, who started DeepSeek in 2023 at his hedge fund Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management, personally invested about 20 billion yuan.

DeepSeek listed a series of positions it is hiring for. They include data engineers, development engineers and AI cross-disciplinary technical talent.

“Humanity is currently on the eve of AGI,” the company wrote in its post, referring to a more powerful form of AI known as artificial general intelligence. “Join DeepSeek, experience the development of AGI firsthand, and sit at the forefront of the times to witness the birth of a new era.” BLOOMBERG