DeepSeek vs StepFun

DeepSeek — Foundation Models · Private · $50B valuation · 4 of 4 figures sourced  |  StepFun — Foundation Models · Private · $10B valuation · 2 of 2 figures sourced

Relationship

DeepSeek API Platform and StepFun Open Platform both serve buyers who need to build on a hosted model API, draft and edit written content and serve a model in production; same layer and the same scale band (late-stage private).

Assembled from the recorded fields for this pair, not hand-checked. The comparison below is read from each company’s own profile.

5 of 6 capabilitiesShared product typeSame scale band

5 of 6 capabilities — Shares agent orchestration, agentic coding, code generation and 2 more.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship application, developer tool and model API.

Ludbee product records

Same scale band — Both late-stage private.

Ludbee scale bands · from valuation and funding figures

Aligned comparison

FieldDeepSeekStepFun
Valuation$50B$10B StepFun has 5.0× smaller
Employees160—
Founded20232023 match
StatusPrivatePrivate match
CategoryFoundation ModelsFoundation Models match
Stack layerApplication, Developer tool, Model APIAI agent, API service, Application, Developer tool, Model API
HeadquartersHangzhou, ChinaShanghai, China

Capability overlap

Shared · 5

Agent orchestrationAgentic codingCode generationModel inferenceText generation

Not verified for StepFun · 1

Summarization

Recorded for DeepSeek. StepFun’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Not verified for DeepSeek · 7

Image generationKnowledge retrievalSpeech to textText to speechVoice agentSearch answersWorkflow automation

Recorded for StepFun. DeepSeek’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Products, side by side

Algorithmic pairing — assembled from recorded fields, not hand-checked

DeepSeek

Application

DeepSeekApplication

Assistant app for chat, reasoning and code questions, built on DeepSeek's own models.

Developer tool

DeepSeek HarnessDeveloper tool

Open-source framework for building agents from composable plugins, distributed under the MIT license as a developer-preview initiative (install via `npx @deepseek-ai/dsh web` or clone from GitHub).

Model API

DeepSeek API PlatformModel API

API access to DeepSeek's chat and reasoning models.

StepFun

Application

阶跃AI (StepFun AI)Application

StepFun's consumer AI assistant, available on the web and as Windows and macOS desktop clients, offering web search, knowledge-base Q&A, image creation, tool use and speech recognition.

Developer tool

阶跃星辰 AI Studio (StepFun AI Studio)Developer tool

A browser-based workspace for building, testing and deploying AI applications on StepFun's models, with a playground, a showcase library of example apps and a personal asset library.

Model API

StepFun Open PlatformModel API

API access to StepFun's text, vision, speech and image models, with credit packages and enterprise plans.

No counterpart

StepFun sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for DeepSeek yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

API service

Step PlanAPI service

A subscription service from the StepFun Open Platform that supplies a monthly Credit pool for calling StepFun's flagship models from third-party coding tools and agent clients such as Claude Code, Cursor, OpenClaw, Cline and Zed.

AI agent

StepClawAI agent

A one-click cloud-deployed AI agent offered inside the 阶跃AI assistant that interprets instructions and carries out tasks autonomously.

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