DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence startup that shook the industry last year with its low-cost R1 reasoning model, said it plans to at least double its workforce after raising more than $7.4 billion in its first funding round at a valuation exceeding $50 billion.
The Hangzhou-based company announced the hiring push in a WeChat statement late Thursday, saying it is recruiting for 27 types of technical and functional roles. The positions include development engineers, data engineers, AI product managers, and operations staff, alongside roles in human resources, legal, and finance. The company said all positions are open to interns.
“Humanity is currently at the dawn of AGI,” DeepSeek said in the statement. “As technology advances, we are striving to at least double the scale of all departments.”
The hiring drive follows DeepSeek’s completion of its first fundraising round, which the company structured in an unusual way to preserve founder control. Founder Liang Wenfeng, who held nearly 90% of the company before the financing, contributed about $3 billion — the largest single investment in the round, according to The Wall Street Journal. Other major investors included Tencent, battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology, and China’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund.
DeepSeek emerged as a major competitor to U.S. AI firms after releasing its R1 model in early 2025, which demonstrated strong performance at a fraction of the training cost of rival systems. The company has since rolled out its V4 model update, as MSI previously reported, with “pro” and “flash” versions that the company said improve knowledge, reasoning, and “agentic” capabilities. The V4 launch came hours after OpenAI released its GPT-5.5 model, underscoring the intensifying pace of competition between Chinese and U.S. AI labs.
The company’s expansion plans come as Beijing pushes for greater self-reliance in advanced technology and as U.S. regulators and companies increasingly scrutinize how Chinese AI firms develop their systems. DeepSeek and other Chinese labs have faced accusations from U.S. companies and allies of building by distilling capabilities from U.S. models — claims the companies have not publicly addressed in detail.
The hiring push also signals that DeepSeek is positioning itself to compete directly with U.S. counterparts OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have raised billions of dollars and scaled their workforces rapidly in recent years. The company’s statement framing the moment as “the dawn of AGI” — artificial general intelligence, a still-hypothetical technology that can match or exceed human performance across most cognitive tasks — reflects the ambitious research agenda the new funding is intended to support.