DeepSeek V4.1 This Week: 75% Price Cut + ¥50B Funding + Full Multimodal

Mid-June 2026 brought three DeepSeek headlines at once: V4.1 is slated for release this week, the first external round of ¥50B ($7B) is essentially closed, and the V4-Pro API was permanently cut 75% earlier. Together they signal a shift—from “best open text model” to full multimodal AI infrastructure with MCP tooling and an enterprise stack.

If you are looking for deepseek v4 updates, the deepseek official site, or a practical deepseek tutorial, this post breaks down funding, pricing, and V4.1 upgrades with comparison tables and a direct try path.

1. ¥50B first-round funding: ammo in place

Around June 16, multiple outlets citing people close to the deal reported that DeepSeek’s first external funding round is essentially closed, raising about ¥51B (~$7.5B) at a post-money valuation near ¥400B—a domestic AI single-round record.

Cap table snapshot

Investor	Amount (approx.)	Notes
Liang Wenfeng (founder)	¥20B	Largest single check, ~40% of round
Tencent	¥10B	Internet strategic capital
CATL	¥5B	New-energy industry capital
JD, NetEase, IDG, etc.	~¥3B each	Diverse participants
National AI Industry Investment Fund	~¥1B	Only strategic investor with full voting rights

Most external capital flows into an LP platform controlled by Liang Wenfeng—investors get economic returns but no operating votes or board seats, with a five-year lock-up. Proceeds target model iteration, proprietary compute, multimodal/AGI R&D, and industrial AI deployment—V4.1 is the most direct product payoff.

2. V4-Pro API permanently cut 75%

On May 22, DeepSeek said DeepSeek-V4-Pro API pricing would permanently move to one-quarter of list after a promo window—75% off across tiers.

New pricing

Item	Original (¥/1M tokens)	Permanent (¥/1M tokens)	Cut
Input (cache hit)	0.1	0.025	75%
Input (cache miss)	12	3	75%
Output	24	6	75%

Competitive snapshot

Model	Input (¥/1M tokens)	Output (¥/1M tokens)
DeepSeek-V4-Pro	3	6
GPT-5.5	~120	~240
Claude Opus 4	~105	~210

The price cut landed alongside funding news. Liang Wenfeng has repeatedly told investors AGI breakthroughs beat short-term monetization—cheap API is ecosystem moat, and runway for V4.1 multimodal + MCP rollout.

3. V4.1 this week: three gaps V4 left open

When V4 preview shipped April 24, text/code strength, 1M context, and open weights were top-tier—but text-only: no images, no audio, brittle tool chains, hard enterprise customization. V4.1 targets those gaps.

3.1 Deeper MCP: from “can call tools” to “calls them reliably”

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the de-facto 2026 agent standard. V4 already speaks MCP; V4.1 adds three layers:

• Reliability: stabler parameter formats, auto-retry on disconnect—less custom regex/retry code
• Composition: declare tool dependencies in one turn; engine chains calls for you
• Security boundary: auth secrets stay on MCP servers; the model only sees descriptions and returns

3.2 Full multimodal input: text + image + audio

V4.1 adds text, image, and audio inputs:

• Upload engineering drawings for direct analysis
• Drop meeting audio for transcripts and action items
• Screenshot products to hunt bugs
• ~7000× image compression: a 756×756 frame down to ~80 KV slots—far less compute than peers
• Visual primitives: bounding boxes and coordinates embedded in reasoning—“point and think”

Ideas trace to DeepSeek’s April paper Thinking with Visual Primitives (withdrawn early May; architecture still widely cited). Strong on topology/spatial counting subsets—not a blanket win on general vision leaderboards.

3.3 Enterprise toolchain: fine-tune, private deploy, MCP gateway

Capability	What it fixes
Fine-tuning	Domain data, jargon, output formats
Private deployment	On-prem/hybrid—data stays in boundary
Access control	Finance/health/gov compliance
MCP gateway	Expose internal services—integration days → hours

4. Competition shifted: benchmarks → ecosystem

V4 was “tech lead”—text/code wins, thin ecosystem. V4.1 is “ecosystem fill”: MCP for usability, multimodal for non-text data, enterprise stack for procurement confidence. 2026 fights on three layers:

1. Tool layer—does it plug into your systems?
2. Multimodal layer—can it ingest all your data types?
3. Enterprise layer—will the CTO sign the contract?

Benchmarks are single-choice; ecosystems are multiple-choice. V4.1 picks the latter.

5. Before V4.1 ships: three prep moves for developers

• Learn MCP: industry-standard in 2026—an hour on the spec beats ten custom tool wrappers
• Build multimodal pipelines: image cleanup, audio ASR, format normalization upfront
• Curate fine-tune datasets: if you sit on private domain knowledge, be ready day one

Exact ship date awaits official word, but the vector is clear: from Q&A to “say one sentence, it finishes the whole job.”

6. Try DeepSeek V4 now

Skip API wiring and open the deepseek official site (deepseek4.hk) for deepseek-v4-flash: 1M context, tool calling, JSON output live today. Any solid deepseek tutorial path—swap endpoint or chat in-browser—works. V4.1 multimodal and MCP upgrades will land on the same entry.