DeepSeek founder’s High-Flyer ranks among China’s top hedge-fund firms in 2025

High-Flyer Quant, co-owned by DeepSeek founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng, recorded a return of 56.6 per cent last year to rank second among China’s 10 top-performing large hedge-fund firms.\nAccording to the ranking published on Monday by data provider Shenzhen PaiPaiWang Investment & Management, High-Flyer only trailed behind Lingjun Investment, which posted a return of 73.5 per cent in 2025.\nAll the top performers were quantitative hedge funds, underscoring the popularity in China of using complex quantitative models to detect investment opportunities.\nQuant funds use mathematical and statistical techniques, together with automated algorithms and advanced quantitative models, to make investment decisions and execute trades.\nHangzhou-based High-Flyer’s stellar 2025 performance – among Chinese hedge funds with more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.43 billion) in managed assets – was based on the 10 index funds it operated as Ningbo High-Flyer Quant Investment Management Partnership.\nStill, some smaller funds achieved higher returns last year, according to the Shenzhen PaiPaiWang report. Those included Shanghai-based Hengshui Asset Management, with a 239 per cent return, and Zhihe Asset Management, with a 108 per cent annual yield.\nHigh-Flyer, which managed assets of between 70 billion yuan and 80 billion yuan as of the third quarter of 2025, ranked as one of the biggest large hedge-fund firms in China, according to QIML, a Chinese blogger with a focus on quantitative trading and machine learning.\n\nThe 2025 returns recorded by the best large hedge-fund firms outperformed the mainland’s stock markets, as the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index, Shenzhen Composite Index and CSI 300 Index only gained 18, 30 and 18 per cent, respectively.\nFounded in 2015, privately held High-Flyer launched for real-time trading on October 21, 2016, using advanced graphics processing units for calculation, according to its website. Before that, funds mainly relied on traditional machine-learning algorithms, while the model calculation mainly relied on personal computer central processing units.\nWith hefty resources at his disposal, Liang established DeepSeek – previously the artificial intelligence lab of High-Flyer – as a separate company in July 2023.\nLiang earlier said that DeepSeek was in no rush to get new investors, partly because of sufficient funding from High-Flyer.\nHigh-Flyer, for example, had subscribed to a total of 82,244 shares of Moore Threads Technology before the chip designer went public in Shanghai last month. High-Flyer appeared to gain a hefty profit from that outlay, as Moore Threads’ shares rose more than five times in its first two trading days after raising about 8 billion yuan from its initial public offering.\n