Filing by Chinese luggage maker pegs DeepSeek’s value near $52 billion

Anhui Korun, a Chinese travel luggage manufacturer, disclosed a public price for DeepSeek for the first time in a regulatory filing. The total comes to ~$51.82 billion. The Hangzhou AI startup has never stated how much outside investors will pay for a piece of it.

Anhui Korun disclosed on July 16 that a fund it backs through a subsidiary paid 2.9 billion yuan for an indirect 0.8265% stake in DeepSeek. When multiplied by the entire company, DeepSeek is worth 350.88 billion yuan, according to Reuters calculations. DeepSeek does not file regular financial reports. The stray line in a luggage manufacturer’s disclosure is one of the only hard data points available.

Luggage filing exposes rare DeepSeek numbers

DeepSeek is a privately held and unlisted company. There is no obligation to open its books. It never disclosed the price or investor list from its initial outside fundraising round. The Anhui Korun filing reveals both. A routine disclosure from an unrelated industry proved to be evidence of an AI company’s value.

DeepSeek turned down external capital in favor of High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund run by founder Liang Wenfeng. In May, the startup began raising funds to secure computing capacity and improve employee pay and conditions.

In June, Reuters reported that DeepSeek had secured ~50 billion yuan or ~$7.4 billion in funding from Tencent and battery maker CATL. The post-money figure ranged between 350 billion and 400 billion yuan. The Anhui Korun disclosure is at the bottom of that range.

DeepSeek’s rise from R1 to in-house chips

Early last year, DeepSeek became known around the world. Both the V3 and R1 models showed that a Chinese lab could compete with the best developers in the US. When it came out in January 2025, R1 was on par with the best American systems, even though it claimed to use a lot less computing power. A lot of people in the industry had to rethink how much hardware a competitive model really needs after that result.

Cryptopolitan reported that DeepSeek is making its own chip for inference, which is the step where a trained model answers a user’s question. That’s an attempt to depend less on both Huawei and Nvidia. The price at DeepSeek has also been very low. In May 2026, it cut V4-Pro rates by 75%, from $3.30 per million tokens to less than $0.85.

Those steps fit the story of getting money. According to a past report by Cryptopolitan, DeepSeek’s first round of outside funding could be worth $7 billion. It’s easier for investors like Tencent and CATL to defend a $52 billion valuation when hardware and tokens are cheaper. Right now, the only public source for that number is the legal paperwork for a Chinese luggage maker.