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DeepSeek builds open-source artificial intelligence models that people and businesses can download, run, and modify for free.
DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that builds large language models — the kind of AI software that answers questions, writes code, and reasons through problems. It gives these models away, mostly for free, as open source. Anyone can download the weights, run the model on their own machines, and tweak it however they like. That is unusual in an industry where the leading players guard their best models closely and charge for access.
Most AI labs spend enormous sums training models and then try to earn it back by selling API access, where developers pay per word the model processes. DeepSeek does sell API access too, but far more cheaply than rivals, and it publishes its models openly rather than keeping them locked up. The company's real claim to fame is efficiency. Its models were trained for a fraction of what American labs reportedly spent, and in early 2025 its reasoning model briefly matched or beat the best from OpenAI and Google on several benchmarks while costing dramatically less to run. That shock helped trigger a sharp selloff in AI and chip stocks, briefly wiping hundreds of billions of dollars off the market value of Nvidia. DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who also runs the quantitative trading firm High-Flyer. High-Flyer supplied the money and, crucially, the computing hardware. Because US export controls limited how many advanced Nvidia chips Chinese firms could buy, DeepSeek had to squeeze more out of less — a constraint that pushed its engineers toward clever training tricks, like building models in smaller pieces and using a mixture-of-experts design where only a slice of the model fires at any moment. The company also publishes its research papers in detail, so its methods spread quickly through the field. Its app shot to the top of Apple's US App Store in January 2025, showing that a free, capable chatbot from a little-known Chinese startup could pull users away from household names.
Two marketing veterans, one from P&G and one from McKinsey, saw the internet ad boom coming and started a company to ride it. Their early product, AlphaDesk, placed targeted ads and bought traffic for brands. It was, in plain terms, an ordinary ad company. They later added AlphaData, a data-management platform for big companies, to reach beyond advertising.
Ten years in, the company changed its name from Pinyou Interactive to Shenyan Intelligence and repositioned itself around using AI to make better ad decisions for big companies. Same company, new outfit, and a bet that intelligence, not just ad buying, was the future.
By 2024 the bet had a scorecard: the company ranked first in China's market for AI-powered marketing and sales decisions, though its slice was small. It ranked fourth in the broader decision-AI market. The same two platforms, AlphaDesk and AlphaData, still carried the business.
Co-founder Xiaonan Huang kept the top job, serving as Chairwoman of the Board and General Manager. She had led the company from its founding, straight through the IPO era, so the strategy was never a stranger's.
The company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in May 2026, raising about HK$403 million, with half earmarked for AI product research and some for acquisitions. Retail investors piled in, oversubscribing the offering thousands of times over, hungry for a profitable enterprise AI story. The stock jumped by more than 265% on day one and kept climbing for days, reaching roughly eight times its IPO price.
Then the floor gave way. In a single day the stock plunged over 12%, wiping out about HK$5 billion in market value, right after a three-day run had pushed the company near a HK$40 billion valuation. The question underneath was simple and sharp: how much does AI really add to the money, when the core revenue still comes from traditional ad placement?
The company answered the doubters by going all in on agents. It renamed its business into Agentic Software and Agentic Marketing Services, launched a unified platform called DeepAgent 4.0 Pro, and built more than 20 AI agents for things like sales, service and product ideas. Revenue in the first half of 2026 rose 43.6% from a year earlier, as products got delivered more efficiently and each customer was worth more.
Outside judges took notice too: IDC named the company a global Leader in agentic marketing platforms for consumer-facing businesses, the only Chinese vendor in the top tier. The nod was a vote of confidence in its agent platform and helped open doors to new markets.
To scale the agent story, the company signed a cooperation agreement with Huawei Cloud to build AI-powered marketing cloud products together. Huawei Cloud brings the infrastructure, computing power and agent platform; DeepZero brings the marketing AI and industry know-how. Pilots aimed at carmakers and retailers, with plans to go nationwide and eventually global.
The business has real risks. Running AI models costs money, and giving them away makes it hard to build a big revenue stream. DeepSeek leans on cheap API sales, but open source means customers can take the model and host it themselves, skipping DeepSeek entirely. It depends heavily on Nvidia chips it may struggle to buy more of, and it operates in a country where the government can shape what AI companies do and say. Rivals are numerous, well funded, and moving fast. Still, DeepSeek matters because it proved that you do not need to be the richest lab to build something close to the frontier — and that lesson reshaped how the whole industry thinks about cost.
Saved answer · last researched 7 Nov 2026
China's top AI marketing firm holds 2.6% of its home market
DeepZero leads China's market for AI that helps companies decide how to sell and advertise, yet its slice is only 2.6% of that market by 2024 revenue. The runner-up sits 1.8 points behind. Being number one in a market this fragmented means plenty of room for rivals, so the company's grip on its main source of income is thin. Source: Frost & Sullivan via 36Kr, data from 2024