No VC, no KPIs: spinning out on its own terms

On July 17, 2023, DeepSeek spun out of High-Flyer as a standalone company, fully internally funded, no VC. Liang Wenfeng's stated principle: 'We have no commercial pressure. No KPIs.' Operating logic was singular: solve the technical problems, then open-source the results.

The lab was carved out as an independent company, DeepSeek, fully funded by High-Flyer. While nearly every AI startup chased VC validation and the next valuation round, Liang Wenfeng said: “We have no commercial pressure. No KPIs.” It bordered on hubris — but behind it stood eight years of quant accumulation as capital cushion. The company operated on one simple logic: solve the technical problems, then open-source the results. This structure let DeepSeek dodge product-manager pressure and quarterly target tugs-of-war, sinking instead into the truly thorny research questions — like how to compress a model's KV cache to 6.7% of its original size.