Liang Wenfeng
Liang Wenfeng: From a rural village to AI entrepreneur
Liang Wenfeng was born in 1985 in Wuchuan, Guangdong, China. His parents were primary school teachers. He studied at Zhejiang University, earning a Bachelor of Engineering in electronic information engineering in 2007 and a Master of Engineering in information and communication engineering in 2010. His master’s thesis was about improving object tracking with a low-cost camera.
Early life and education
Liang started exploring AI and finance after college. During the 2008 financial crisis, he and his classmates formed a team to collect market data and study quantitative trading with machine learning. He later moved to Chengdu, where he tried applying AI to different areas, eventually focusing on finance. In 2013 he co-founded Hangzhou Yakebi Investment Management with Xu Jin, and in 2015 he helped start Hangzhou Huanfang Technology (now Zhejiang Jiuzhang Asset Management).
Career beginnings and High-Flyer
In February 2016, Liang and two engineering classmates founded Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management. The team used math and AI to guide investments. In 2019 he started High-Flyer AI to research AI algorithms and their basic uses, and the firm grew to manage more than 10 billion yuan in assets.
Liang gave a notable keynote on August 30, 2019, about the future of quantitative investing in China. He argued that a truly quantitative fund relies on data and algorithms rather than human portfolio managers, and he said High-Flyer’s mission was to improve China’s secondary market.
DeepSeek and beyond
In 2021 Liang wrote the Chinese edition preface for Gregory Zuckerman’s book The Man Who Solved the Market, reflecting on the idea that prices can be modeled with the right approach. He also began buying thousands of Nvidia GPUs to support his AI projects while running High-Flyer, something his partners saw as a leap beyond ordinary startup work.
In May 2023, Liang launched DeepSeek, a company aimed at pursuing artificial general intelligence. High-Flyer supports DeepSeek, which aims to develop large language models (LLMs). In 2023–2024, DeepSeek bought about 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before U.S. restrictions on AI chips, building a foundation for its AI work.
In January 2025, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, a 671-billion-parameter open-source reasoning AI model, built with a relatively small number of GPUs and a cost of around $5.6 million. By late January, DeepSeek was reported to have become the top free app on the U.S. iOS App Store, and U.S. markets experienced a broad stock sell-off linked to AI news.
Public appearances and influence
On January 20, 2025, Liang was invited to a government-level symposium in Beijing to share ideas on the government’s work plan. He attended another high-profile event in February 2025 with China’s top leaders.
Recognition and wealth
In August 2025, Time magazine named Liang Wenfeng one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI. He was also listed by Fortune as one of the 100 Most Powerful People in Business. By November 2025, his net worth was reported around $11 billion, and he joined China’s list of the 100 richest people.
Liang is known for combining software and finance, pushing AI innovation in China, and keeping a low public profile while growing his technology-driven companies.
This page was last edited on 29 January 2026, at 09:33 (CET).