Liang Wenfeng

Liang Wenfeng (; born 1985) is a Chinese entrepreneur and businessman who is the co-founder of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, as well as the founder and CEO of its artificial intelligence company DeepSeek.

Liang attended Zhejiang University, and began his career by applying machine learning methods to quantitative finance. Through High-Flyer, he built large-scale computing infrastructure that was later used to support artificial intelligence research, leading to the creation of DeepSeek in 2023. DeepSeek gained international attention following the release of DeepSeek-R1, which analysts described as demonstrating high-level performance with comparatively limited compute resources.

In 2025, Liang was named to Time magazine's list of 100 Most Influential People in AI and Fortune's list of the Most Powerful People in Business.

In July 2026, Bloomberg News reported that Liang had become the world's wealthiest founder of an AI-model company, with a net worth of $36 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Early life Liang was born in 1985 in the village of Mililing , Qinba town , Wuchuan, Guangdong. Liang was routinely praised by both locals and teachers alike.

Liang then attended Wuchaun No. 1 High School. In these years, he developed hobbies of mathematical modeling and conducting research projects. Compared to his peers, he was always ranked highly. For every mathematics exam, he always ranked within the top three. He was also the top scorer in the Zhanjiang region of Guangdong for the college entrance exam. With a score of 806, he met the admission requirements for Tsinghua University but ultimately chose to attend Zhejiang University due to the major offered. Thus, in 2002, Liang left high school early to further pursue his education at the university level at the young age of 17. His master's dissertation was titled "Study on Object Tracking Algorithm Based on Low-Cost PTZ camera" .

In his college years, DJI founder Wang Tao asked Liang to join as a co-founder. Liang declined the invitation to pursue artificial intelligence methodologies in financial markets.

Career

Early career (2008–2016) During the 2008 financial crisis, Liang formed a team with his classmates to accumulate data related to financial markets. He also led the team to explore quantitative trading using machine learning and other technologies.

After his graduation, Liang moved to a cheap flat in Chengdu, Sichuan, where he experimented with ways to apply AI to various fields. These ventures failed, until he tried applying AI to finance.

High-Flyer (2016–2023) In February 2016, Liang and two other engineering classmates co-founded Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management Partnership (Limited Partnership). The team relied on mathematics and AI to make investments. Much of the early startup culture was described by former employees to be "geeky" and "quirky," often seen as contrary to the existing culture in large Chinese tech companies.

In 2019, Liang founded High-Flyer AI which was dedicated to research on AI algorithms and its basic applications. By this time, High-Flyer had over 10 billion yuan in assets under management.

During 2021, Liang started buying thousands of Nvidia GPUs for his AI side project while running High-Flyer. Liang wanted to build something and it will be a game changer which his business partners thought was only possible from giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba Group.

DeepSeek (since 2023)

DeepSeek begins In May 2023, Liang announced High-Flyer would pursue the development of artificial general intelligence and launched DeepSeek. During that month in an interview with 36Kr, Liang stated that High-Flyer had acquired 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the US government imposed AI chip restrictions on China. That laid the foundation for DeepSeek to operate as an LLM developer.

Liang also stated DeepSeek gets funding from High-Flyer. This was because when DeepSeek was founded, venture capital firms were reluctant in providing funding as it was unlikely that it would be able to generate an exit in a short period of time. Liang only personally holds 1% of the company, with 99% of the company being held by Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management Partnership (Limited Partnership). With DeepSeek's funding model, it lacks commercial pressure and rigid key performance indicators, enabling the company to deviate from previously established model architectures.

Early development In July 2024, Liang was interviewed again by 36Kr. He stated that when DeepSeek-V2 was released and triggered an AI price war in China, it came as a huge surprise as the team did not expect pricing to be so sensitive. Liang's aggressive pricing of the language model forced domestic tech giants including Alibaba and Baidu to cut their own rates by over 95%.

As the goal was long-term, DeepSeek sought employees who had ability and passion rather than experience. Liang, being considered as an industry expert, was asked to provide opinions and suggestions on a draft for comments of the annual 2024 government work report.

Recognition Many experts have remarked on Liang's unique skillset and attitude towards AI development. In the same month, he was named on Fortune 's 100 Most Powerful People in Business. In November 2025, after a reported net worth of $11 billion, he was added to China's 100 richest list.