Quant trading, then an AI lab
Liang Wenfeng's wealth comes from two closely linked businesses he founded in Hangzhou. The first is High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund that he co-founded in 2015 with partners he met while studying at Zhejiang University. The fund uses mathematical models and machine learning to trade Chinese stocks and grew into one of the largest quant managers in the country.
High-Flyer invested early in computing power. It built its own clusters of graphics processors, known as Fire-Flyer, for training trading models, and it acquired a large number of Nvidia chips before the United States restricted exports of advanced processors to China. That hardware and the engineering team around it became the foundation for Liang's second venture.
In 2023 Liang founded DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence research company funded by High-Flyer rather than by outside venture capital. DeepSeek released a series of large language models, and in December 2024 and January 2025 it published DeepSeek-V3 and the reasoning model DeepSeek-R1. The models performed close to leading Western systems while the company described training costs far below those of its rivals. Because DeepSeek is privately held and Liang is its controlling shareholder, his ownership of DeepSeek and his interest in High-Flyer are the main sources of his fortune.
The businesses he controls
Liang's holdings are concentrated in a small number of private companies:
- DeepSeek: an AI lab in Hangzhou that develops large language models and releases many of them with open weights, allowing others to download and run them
- High-Flyer: a quantitative investment firm managing funds for Chinese investors
- Computing infrastructure: the GPU clusters built by High-Flyer, which support both trading research and AI model training
DeepSeek's chatbot app reached the top of the Apple App Store download charts in the United States and other countries in January 2025. The news that a Chinese company had built a competitive model with limited resources triggered a sharp one day fall in the shares of Nvidia and other technology companies, as investors questioned the spending plans of American AI firms.
DeepSeek has followed an unusual strategy for an AI company. It has not raised money from external investors, it offers access to its models at low prices, and it has published research papers describing its methods. Several governments and companies outside China have restricted the use of its app on official devices, citing data security concerns.
From Zhanjiang to Zhejiang University
Liang Wenfeng was born in 1985 in Zhanjiang, a coastal city in Guangdong province. His father worked as a primary school teacher. He was a strong student in mathematics and went on to study at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, one of the country's leading universities.
He earned a bachelor's degree in electronic information engineering in 2007 and a master's degree in information and communication engineering in 2010, with research related to machine vision. During the global financial crisis, while still a student, he and classmates began experimenting with automated trading strategies, collecting market data and testing models.
After graduating he continued to work on quantitative trading, and in 2015 he and his partners set up High-Flyer. He has given very few interviews, but in those he has described himself as driven mainly by curiosity about artificial general intelligence. He has said DeepSeek hires mostly young graduates from Chinese universities and that it focuses on fundamental research rather than quick commercialization.
Public attention after DeepSeek
Before 2025 Liang was almost unknown outside China's quant fund industry. The success of DeepSeek-R1 changed that quickly. In January 2025 he attended a symposium hosted by Premier Li Qiang, and in February 2025 he was among the business leaders at a meeting with President Xi Jinping, signs that the government saw DeepSeek as a national technology achievement.
He has continued to avoid publicity, rarely speaking to the media and keeping DeepSeek focused on research. The company's decision to share its models openly was widely discussed in the technology world, and many developers and companies built products on top of them.
There is little public record of personal philanthropy by Liang. High-Flyer has made charitable donations through its own channels in the past, and the company has been active in the Chinese quant fund community. Liang's main public role is as the founder of DeepSeek, which has become a reference point in debates about competition between China and the United States in artificial intelligence and about export controls on advanced chips.