China's DeepSeek pauses new fundraising days after founder Liang Wenfeng's AI remarks go viral

Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has paused its second fundraising round just weeks after raising a record $7 billion, reports Bloomberg citing people familiar with the matter. The move comes days after comments widely attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng about China's AI industry and its competition with the US spread widely online. Prospective investors were verbally informed that they would not be signing investment agreements in the coming days as expected. While the fundraising process has been put on hold for now, discussions remain ongoing and the company could choose to restart the deal at a later stage, the people said.