Liang is the founder of DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence company that's developing open source models to compete with rivals such as ChatGPT. The Hangzhou-based startup has had more than 75 million downloads since its launch in January 2025. Liang's funded DeepSeek with profits from High-Flyer, his quantitative hedge fund.
The majority of Liang’s fortune is derived from his controlling stake in DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence company. DeepSeek has had more than 75 million downloads since its launch in January 2025, according to a January 2026 report.
Liang owns about 84% of DeepSeek, according to corporate information provider Qichacha. The valuation of DeepSeek is uncertain. It's valued in this analysis based on the average mid-point of three estimated valuation ranges provided to Bloomberg by research analysts. These valuations range from about $10 billion to $28 billion.
His quantitative hedge fund, Ningbo High Flyer Quant Investment Management, has assets under management of 70 billion yuan ($10 billion), according to a Jan. 12, 2026 Bloomberg News report. It's valued based on the average price-to-assets under management multiple of five publicly traded peers. Liang's profits and assets in the fund aren't included in the analysis because of uncertainty and to avoid double counting. Returns from High-Flyer have helped fund the growth of DeepSeek, according to the same Bloomberg News report.
The company didn't respond to a request for comment on the net worth calculation.
Liang was born in 1985 in a small village in southern Guangdong, China. His parents were elementary school teachers. Liang was a promising student and quickly became adept at mathematics.
He left school early to begin studying at Zhejiang University as a 17-year-old. After graduating in 2007, Liang began pursuing artificial intelligence applications in finance. He started his first investment firm in 2013 and co-founded the Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management Partnership in 2016.
Liang's early adoption of AI helped fuel fast growth at High-Flyer and by 2019 it had built it's own AI supercomputing cluster. Around this time its asset under management reached 10 billion yuan, or around $1.5 billion.
The stockpiling of Nvidia GPUs helped High-Flyer to further it's AI research, leading to the establishment of DeepSeek in 2023. By early 2025, DeepSeek had launched it's low-cost R1 model; an advancement that enabled it to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI.