DeepSeek passes $1B revenue run rate, hires first CFO and prepares STAR Market IPO

DeepSeek is turning from a research lab into a listed company. Its revenue run rate has crossed $1B, more than doubling since the company raised API prices in mid-August. It has hired Yan Wentao as its first CFO and engaged CITIC Securities to structure an IPO on Shanghai's tech-focused STAR Market.

The engine is V4.1 Flash. It is a 552-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates just 8 billion parameters per token. KV-cache compression brings memory down to about 890 bytes per token, roughly a quarter of V4 Flash's footprint, cutting HBM needs to 25% and local storage to 12.5% of previous tiers. It now has native multimodal support and is available as open weights on Hugging Face. On OpenRouter it led weekly usage for a second straight week with 19.6T tokens, up 24% week over week, priced around 70% below rivals.

The competitive message is that ultra-sparse open models can be commercially large and, apparently, profitable. That contrasts with Anthropic's prospectus showing a $42B 2025 loss. An FT report that corporate America is embracing open models over pricey frontier ones (620 upvotes on r/LocalLLaMA) reinforces the theme.

Caveats: the August price hikes drew 'spreadsheet screenshots, migration threats' from customers, though most reportedly stayed. A domestic STAR listing keeps DeepSeek clear of US exchanges but exposes it to Chinese regulatory timing. Export controls on compute remain the biggest long-term risk.