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DeepSeek

Chinese AI lab famous for the V4 series. V4 Flash at $0.14/1M is the cheapest pro-quality API. Peak/valley pricing model.

Chinese AI lab famous for the V4 series. V4 Flash at $0.14/1M is the cheapest pro-quality API. Peak/valley pricing model.

Founded 2023
Hangzhou, China
deepseek.com

DeepSeek History Timeline(30)

2026-08-26
funding

DeepSeek nears 50B yuan funding at 500B yuan valuation

DeepSeek plans to raise ~50B yuan at ~500B yuan pre-money ($74B), expected to close before end of August, targeting 2027 STAR Market IPO

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2026-08-25
launch

V4-Flash-Vision-Exp visual understanding model launches

Native image input. Can identify people, read screenshots, parse charts. Harness updated to v0.1.1-rc.1.

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2026-08-25
funding

RMB 141M strategic stake in Unitree Robotics (2.31%)

Signed MoU covering joint AGI R&D, priority robot procurement, and AI model adaptation.

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2026-08-24
research

Harness 0.1.1-rc.2 critical vulnerability QVD-2026-57410 disclosed

Harness 0.1.1-rc.2 critical vulnerability QVD-2026-57410 disclosed

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2026-08-23
pricing

DeepSeek unifies weekend pricing to off-peak rates from August 23

Optimized peak-valley billing: weekends no longer distinguish peak vs off-peak and use off-peak rates all day. The same day V4 Pro GA hit the API with significantly stronger Agent capabilities, Responses API plus Codex support, scoring 87.9 on Terminal-Bench.

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2026-08-23
pricing

API weekends unified at off-peak pricing

API weekends unified at off-peak pricing

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2026-08-21
launch

DeepSeek launches multimodal V4-Flash-Vision-Exp

Experimental multimodal vision-understanding V4-Flash-Vision-Exp launched on the API, priced the same as V4-Flash. Text performance matches V4-Flash and multimodal agent capability is close to Opus 4.8. Files API launched alongside. Chartography 64.3, Terminal Bench 2.1 83.9, ApexBench rose from 26.2 to 36.5.

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2026-08-19
release

DeepSeek Harness v0.1.0-rc.8: native image requests plus Claude Code / Codex sub-agents

Model adapter supports native image requests and image+text input. Claude Code and Codex became installable Profile Bundles; Codex gets a non-interactive permission mode and multi-instance parallelism. web_search supports concurrent queries.

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2026-08-17
pricing

DeepSeek V4-Pro peak/valley pricing takes effect

From 00:00 Beijing time on August 17, peak/valley pricing takes effect. During peak hours (9-12 and 14-18 Beijing time on weekdays), V4-Pro cached input price rises up to 1100%, output from 6 to 27 yuan per 1M tokens.

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2026-08-17
pricing

V4 API peak/off-peak pricing live; V4-Pro cached input +1100%

At midnight on Aug 17 DeepSeek V4 fully moved to peak/off-peak pricing; V4-Pro cached input rose up to 1100% during peak hours.

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2026-08-13
launch

V4-Pro official version live (1M context + 384K output)

Went live on App, web, and API on Aug 13 with three thinking intensity tiers.

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2026-08-13
pricing

Peak-valley API pricing effective 8/17

Peak-hour V4-Pro at ¥9 input / ¥27 output per million tokens; V4-Flash at ¥3 input / ¥9 output.

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2026-08-13
launch

DeepSeek Harness v0.1 crosses 100K GitHub stars in 45 hours

Harness developer preview open-sourced August 13 (MIT license) under "everything is a plugin" philosophy based on the Cordis plugin system. Reached 105K GitHub stars in 45 hours, 4,300+ third-party plugins within 3 days.

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2026-08-11
market

DeepSeek-V4-Flash tops OpenRouter weekly with 9.39 trillion tokens

For the week of August 3-9 DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 led OpenRouter global call volume at 9.39 trillion tokens.

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2026-08-08
funding

DeepSeek invests RMB 141M in Unitree

Strategic placement announced Aug 6 with 36-month lockup, longest among external investors

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2026-08-08
funding

DeepSeek resumes Series 2 at 500B yuan pre-money

On August 5, resumed second funding round, targeting 50B yuan raise.

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2026-08-05
pricing

V4 series pricing announced

V4-Flash ¥1/¥2, V4-Pro ¥3/¥6 per 1M tokens; peak/valley pricing

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2026-08-05
pricing

V4-Flash output ¥2 per 1M tokens

International $0.28 output per 1M tokens, cheapest globally

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2026-08-05
funding

DeepSeek launches second ¥50 billion funding round at ¥500 billion pre-money

Reported August 5, DeepSeek restarted a second round targeting ¥50 billion at a pre-money valuation of about ¥500 billion, signing targeted for late August.

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2026-07-24
deprecation

Old name deepseek-chat retired

Fully retired July 24, migrate to V4-Flash/V4-Pro

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2026-07-15
pricing

Peak/valley pricing mechanism launched

Weekday 9-12/14-18 peak hours prices double

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2026-04-08
pricing

V3.2 API price drop

DeepSeek V3.2 eased to $0.20/$0.77 per million tokens.

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2026-03-15
pricing

V3.2 API price +264%

DeepSeek V3.2 rose from $0.14/$0.28 to $0.27/$1.10 per million tokens.

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2025-09-06
pricing

V3.1 API price hike

Sep 6, input miss ¥4, output ¥12 per 1M tokens, off-peak removed

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2025-08-21
launch

DeepSeek-V3.1 launch

Aug 21, hybrid reasoning, 128K context, UE8M0 FP8

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2025-03-24
launch

DeepSeek V3.2 released

DeepSeek released V3.2 with hybrid reasoning; later price swings sparked price war.

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2025-01-28
launch

Janus-Pro released

Released Janus-Pro and JanusFlow multimodal frameworks for image generation and understanding.

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2025-01-27
market

Nvidia plunges 17%

DeepSeek app tops US/China charts, triggering US tech sell-off; Nvidia loses ~$600B in one day.

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2025-01-20
launch

DeepSeek-R1 open-sourced

Released R1 reasoning model matching OpenAI o1, fully open-sourced, trained for under $6M.

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2025-01-20
pricing

DeepSeek-R1 API launch price ($0.55/$2.19)

DeepSeek-R1 API at $0.55 input / $2.19 output per million tokens (cache hit $0.14).

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