China’s richest people are usually easy to explain. They own listed shares whose value is set every day by strangers. Liang Wenfeng’s fortune is different. It rests on a company that has no public shareholders, no disclosed revenue and no product for retail customers to buy.
On 27 October, Hurun Research released its 2026 China Rich List, with wealth measured as of 1 September. Liang, 41, entered at RMB 280 billion and went straight to seventh place. It was his first appearance. Immediately behind him were Ding Lei at RMB 275 billion and Li Ka-shing with his son Li Zekai at RMB 253 billion.
A valuation that doubled in seven months
In Hurun’s own explanation, the reason Liang was absent last year was a statement he had made about not commercialising the company. What changed is the valuation: it climbed past USD 50 billion during the year, powered by two funding rounds.
The first closed in June at roughly RMB 50 billion. The second, reported by multiple outlets on 22 October, was around RMB 100 billion, roughly double, at a pre-money valuation still near RMB 500 billion, or about USD 75 billion. New and existing shareholders were each expected to take about half. DeepSeek declined to comment.
To put the size in context: according to Zero2IPO Research, total equity investment across China in the first half of 2026 was RMB 565.4 billion. A single round at one unlisted company absorbed close to a sixth of the entire national market.
The round that raised more without raising the price
The most interesting structural detail is that the cheque doubled while the valuation did not move. According to a 13 October report in the Star Market Daily, the target was lifted from RMB 50 billion to about RMB 100 billion while the pre-money mark stayed at roughly RMB 500 billion.
Investment bankers quoted in the report offer two explanations. Demand in the first round was heavy enough that a large pool of committed capital could not get in, so the company simply widened the door at the same price. And large-model development plus compute build-out is a long, capital-hungry business, so a bigger cash buffer buys a longer runway and fewer future raises.
Both readings point the same way. This is a company rationing access, not a company chasing money. That is a very different posture from almost every other Chinese AI startup currently in the market.
What the ranking actually measures
The list itself is a snapshot of a wider redistribution. Zhang Yiming, 43, took first place at RMB 670 billion, adding RMB 200 billion in a year and setting a record for a Chinese fortune. Zhong Shanshan fell RMB 120 billion to RMB 410 billion. Zeng Yuqun held third at RMB 385 billion.
The entry threshold for the top ten dropped RMB 20 billion to RMB 205 billion. Among 263 new entrants, Liang ranked first. Second was Wang Xingxing of Unitree at RMB 69.5 billion, aged 36.
Two of the three new faces in the top ten are hardware people. One builds servers and models, the other builds humanoid robots and quadruped machines. The paper wealth of the Chinese tech elite has moved from platforms and consumer internet toward compute and physical machines.
The listing question underneath
According to an earlier Caijing report, DeepSeek has been approaching investment banks since late August to prepare a listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market, has retained CITIC Securities, and aims to file as early as the end of 2026 with a target listing in 2027.
If that happens, the RMB 500 billion private mark will meet a public market for the first time. Everything in the current valuation, including Liang’s RMB 280 billion, is a private number agreed between sophisticated buyers and a company that did not need their money. Public markets are less polite. They will ask what the revenue is.
For now the arithmetic is clean. A company that did not want to commercialise became, in seven months, the most heavily funded private AI business in the country, and its founder became richer than the families that built Hong Kong’s property and ports.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Sohu Tech report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.sohu.com/a/1093345584_324659.