High-Flyer Quant

High-Flyer Quant is a quantitative investment company founded by Liang Wenfeng, who studied artificial intelligence at Zhejiang University and, after graduating, chose to build the firm from a cheap rental in Chengdu rather than join a major tech company . The firm stands out among China's top quant funds as a purely homegrown operation without the typical U.S. or European hedge fund pedigree . It reached a scale of 100 billion RMB by 2021, earning a place among the "quant four kings," though it later voluntarily downsized to around 50 billion after significant drawdowns in late 2022 .

High-Flyer's most distinctive move came in May 2023 when it launched DeepSeek as an independent organization dedicated to artificial general intelligence research, explicitly separating the effort from its quant business . Liang framed this not as a pivot but as a natural progression: the firm had built substantial AI capabilities early, including a self-developed deep learning platform with roughly 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs by 2021—giving it, by some estimates, more compute than many major tech companies at the time . As 峰瑞资本 noted, High-Flyer's "engineering gene"—honed through nanosecond-level execution demands in quant trading and low-level hardware optimization work like FPGA customization—shaped DeepSeek's approach to GPU programming and algorithm efficiency .