DeepSeek nears $12B round with Tencent and CATL ahead of IPO
Three stories shape the last 24 hours: a record-scale fundraise at China's most famous model lab, a first-of-its-kind hearing at New York City Hall, and Cohere rebuilding its enterprise agent platform around other people's models.
DeepSeek is close to raising at least $12 billion — 80 billion yuan — in a single round that could reach roughly $14.9 billion, after investor demand outstripped the company's own target, with Tencent and battery maker CATL as the biggest contributors, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg; Reuters separately reports a raise of at least $12 billion. The lab, which became famous in early 2025 by shipping capable models at a fraction of rivals' cost, is lining up the money ahead of an IPO it hopes to complete in early 2027 — the moment DeepSeek stops being a research curiosity and gets a public-market scoreboard. The buyer list is the story: Tencent writing the biggest cheque is a strategic wager from a company that runs one of China's largest consumer AI stacks, while CATL's presence shows the money chasing AI now reaches well beyond the usual internet majors. If the round closes at the top of the range, the industry's cheapest-model disruptor ends its underdog era with a war chest built for the long haul — the DeepSeek discount was always going to collide with a balance sheet eventually. We tracked DeepSeek's listing maneuvering before — DeepSeek preps a STAR Market IPO — and cuts prices 60% the same day.
New York City Council put OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta representatives under oath on Monday in what the council billed as a first-of-its-kind hearing, with all 51 members in the room and former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon testifying alongside fellow whistleblowers. Coxon told lawmakers the industry is "racing to build and grow our own adversary," and argued that humanity losing control of AI is "more likely than not" — warnings that landed as the council weighs a package of AI oversight bills, including a private right of action that would let residents sue over preventable harms. SpaceXAI, which was subpoenaed, did not appear; the council says it is pursuing enforcement in court. The practical significance is jurisdictional: with federal oversight stalled, the nation's largest city is trying to write the rulebook lab by lab, on the record.
Cohere released North 2, a rebuilt version of its enterprise agent platform pitched as a control room for AI agents no matter which models run them. The update adds cross-session memory, an orchestration layer that coordinates agents pulling from shared knowledge libraries and tools like Slack, SharePoint and Jira, admin controls over token spending and per-agent access, and human sign-off before agents take critical actions — deployable on-premises, in the cloud, or fully air-gapped, and model-agnostic beyond Cohere's own Command A+. LG CNS and Bell Cyber already run North in production, and with the Aleph Alpha acquisition behind it, the pitch is aimed squarely at governments and regulated industries that want any model living under their own roof.
What to watch: whether DeepSeek's round closes above the $12 billion floor — and whether SpaceXAI ends up in court over the council's subpoena.
Is a $12 billion raise for the lab built on being cheap a sign of maturity or the end of the DeepSeek discount? Tell us in the comments.
