Liang Wenfeng (梁文锋)

Founded DeepSeek in May 2023 to pursue AGI "with curiosity." Also co-founded and runs High-Flyer, one of China's largest quantitative hedge funds (AUM peaked at ~100B yuan / $13.9B). High-Flyer owns 99% of DeepSeek and provides all funding — no external VC. Acquired 10,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs before US export restrictions took full effect. Released DeepSeek-R1 (671B) in January 2025 for $5.6M training cost, triggering $1T+ in US stock market losses and forcing Chinese competitors to cut API prices by 95%+.

Born 1985 in Guangdong. Left high school early as top scorer in Zhanjiang region. BEng/MEng from Zhejiang University. Declined a co-founding invitation from DJI's Wang Tao during university. Runs DeepSeek with a bottom-up, no-KPI culture: "Innovation requires minimal intervention. It needs space to experiment and the freedom to make mistakes." Time 100 Most Influential People in AI (2025). Net worth ~$11B (Nov 2025).