DeepSeek set to name its first CFO: GL Ventures partner Yan Wentao

DeepSeek may finally have its first chief financial officer. Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, reports that the company plans to hire Yan Wentao, a partner at GL Ventures, as its first CFO.

Yan was born in 1991 and is 35, one of the younger partners at GL Ventures. He graduated from Fudan University in 2013 and moved into investing, starting at Tencent Investment and later joining H Capital, before entering GL Ventures in 2020 and becoming a partner six years later.

His portfolio spans both the mobile internet era and the current AI wave: ByteDance, Xiaohongshu, the logistics group J&T Express and the brokerage Webull, as well as Zhipu and MiniMax, two AI companies that listed in Hong Kong this year. He also appears on the board of Tashi Zhihang, an embodied AI company.

In an earlier chapter, he worked as an intern reporter on the technology desk of 21st Century Business Herald while at university, covering mobile advertising, e-commerce tax and the internet of things.

DeepSeek's search for a CFO has not been smooth. The company posted the role in February 2025 and then let it sit, with finance handled by people with professional accounting backgrounds. The search restarted in July, when DeepSeek began interviewing young partners at leading venture firms; the heads of Morningside, Sequoia China and Longzhu Capital had all discussed the position with founder Liang Wenfeng in person.

According to the report, people close to DeepSeek say Liang wanted the CFO to be born in the 1990s, a hard requirement that favored the 1991-born Yan.

Much of the outside attention is on a listing. On September 9, Reuters reported that DeepSeek had engaged CITIC Securities to prepare a STAR Market IPO, with filing materials possibly submitted as early as the end of this year and a listing targeted for 2027; neither DeepSeek nor CITIC Securities has responded publicly.

For DeepSeek, hiring a CFO who understands capital markets is tied to its current position: training and inference both consume compute, compute consumes money, and Liang has acknowledged that team stability is the company's biggest risk. QbitAI notes that an IPO would finally let employee options turn into cash, a lever for retaining talent. The question now is whether the new CFO's first real battle is a prospectus.