DeepSeek has agreed to lead the first funding round for Winverse AI, a start‑up building artificial intelligence for robots, people familiar with the matter said. The seed round is worth tens of millions of dollars and would value Winverse at about $400 million after the investment. Meituan’s investment arm Long‑Z has also committed. The deal is not final and the valuation and investors could change.
Winverse founder and background
Winverse was founded this year by Hu Han, who previously led Tencent’s vision‑language and robotics AI teams. Hu holds a PhD from Tsinghua University and has worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu. He left Tencent as the company reshuffled its AI research team to catch up with rivals such as DeepSeek and Moonshot.
DeepSeek’s bet and wider strategy
The planned investment would be one of DeepSeek’s largest bets on a start‑up. The lab already bought a stake in humanoid robot maker Unitree when that company listed in Shanghai. DeepSeek is also close to raising at least $12 billion in a separate round backed by Tencent ahead of a planned listing in early 2027; that funding was mainly intended for training models and data centres.
China leads in building robot bodies, the people said, but making those machines smart enough to handle real‑world tasks requires different AI from chatbots. US competitors such as Skild AI and Physical Intelligence are already valued in the billions.
DeepSeek, Long‑Z and Hu did not respond to requests for comment.
