DeepSeek Plans to Hire GL Ventures Partner Yan Wentao as First CFO

Yan, 35, joined GL Ventures in 2020 and became a partner in six years. He has invested in ByteDance, Xiaohongshu, J&T Express, Webull, Zhipu and MiniMax, according to QuantumBit. His background includes Tencent Investment and H Capital; he began in internet investment in 2013 after graduating from Fudan University.

DeepSeek first posted a CFO position in February 2025, a month after its R1 model gained attention. The role then remained unfilled, and people with professional finance backgrounds managed the company's finances, QuantumBit reported. The company had not been short of money because it was backed by High-Flyer Quant, which managed about 70 billion yuan in 2025 with an average return of 56.6 percent.

In July 2026, DeepSeek restarted CFO recruitment and began interviewing young partners from leading venture capital firms. Executives from 5Y Capital, Sequoia Capital and Longzhu Capital met Liang Wenfeng to discuss the position, according to QuantumBit. In 2023, DeepSeek had pitched itself to VCs and was turned down because investors saw no clear return path.

Yan has kept a low public profile. His only recent public speech mentioned in the report was at the Securities Times' 14th Venture Capital Conference in July 2026, about 50 days before the reported DeepSeek hire. Earlier, he studied environmental science and engineering at Fudan, started a campus discount platform called Fido, and interned at BCG and Roland Berger at 19. In 2013 he was an intern reporter at 21st Century Business Herald's technology desk, writing about mobile advertising, e-commerce taxes and the Internet of Things, and reporting on Tencent.

At GL Ventures, Yan followed an 'invest before the outbreak' approach, according to the report. He began studying large models and GPT-3 in 2020, when Chinese internet companies were focused on community group buying, and moved toward embodied intelligence in 2023. He is listed as a director of Tashi Zhihang. GL Ventures has also produced other young executives: Zhang Yuan left GL Ventures in 2023 to become Mixue's CFO and became its CEO in March 2026, while Xue Zizhao, GL Ventures' first investor in MiniMax, later joined MiniMax.

Yan's first major task as DeepSeek CFO would be an IPO. On Sept. 9, Reuters reported that DeepSeek had hired CITIC Securities to prepare a STAR Market listing, with filing possible by the end of this year and a listing targeted for 2027. Neither DeepSeek nor CITIC Securities publicly commented, but the market reaction was strong, QuantumBit reported.

The IPO plan comes as DeepSeek's finances face pressure. In the first half of 2026, its annual recurring revenue was estimated at 3.5 billion yuan, while its second funding round was seeking a valuation of about 500 billion yuan, more than 100 times ARR, according to the report. Large-model training and inference require expensive computing power and chips. High-Flyer Quant, DeepSeek's financial backer, has also faced less comfortable conditions in recent years.

DeepSeek also faces talent retention risks. Liang Wenfeng has said team stability is the company's biggest risk and that he can achieve AGI if he keeps the team stable, according to the report. But Luo Fuli was recruited by Xiaomi, Guo Daya joined ByteDance Seed and Wang Bingxuan joined Tencent Hunyuan. An IPO could allow employees to cash out options.

Liang, who came from quantitative trading, understands numbers, but a public company CFO needs expertise in disclosure, corporate governance, regulators and shareholders, areas not in High-Flyer's existing system, the report said. Yan's experience investing in MiniMax and Zhipu could help DeepSeek present its AI story to capital markets and write a prospectus. A person close to DeepSeek said Liang wanted the CFO to be born in the 1990s, according to QuantumBit.