- DeepSeek is leading a $400 million seed round for Winverse AI, a stealth robotics startup founded by ex-Tencent scientist Hu Han.
- The round would value Winverse at roughly $400 million, drawing on DeepSeek‘s own fundraising of more than $12 billion.
- Meituan’s Long-Z Investments is also committing capital to the round.
- DeepSeek already holds a 2.31% stake in humanoid robot maker Unitree Robotics.
What Happened
DeepSeek is leading a $400 million seed round for Winverse AI, a stealth robotics startup founded by Hu Han, a former Tencent scientist who led the company’s vision-language and embodied foundation model teams, Bloomberg reported on October 12, 2026. Hu holds a PhD from Tsinghua University and previously worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu. The round would value Winverse at roughly $400 million once it closes, with Meituan’s Long-Z Investments also committing capital.
Why It Matters
The deal extends DeepSeek’s push into embodied intelligence beyond language models. DeepSeek is drawing on its own fundraising, which is reportedly close to topping $12 billion, to bankroll one of the industry’s fastest-growing fields rather than simply licensing models to robotics partners — a similar logic to Flow Engineering’s $750 million valuation for AI hardware design. AI labs are increasingly treating robotics as a direct extension of core research rather than an adjacent bet.
Technical Details
Winverse was founded in 2026 around Hu’s work on vision-language and embodied foundation models — systems built to interpret visual scenes and natural-language instructions together rather than through separate pipelines. Bloomberg’s report did not disclose Winverse’s product roadmap or whether it plans to build its own hardware or license models to existing robot makers.
Who’s Affected
Chinese robotics startups gain a deep-pocketed backer in DeepSeek. Unitree Robotics, in which DeepSeek holds a 2.31% stake ahead of its August Shanghai listing, now sits alongside a second robotics bet from the same investor.
What’s Next
Watch for the round to formally close, Winverse’s first public product details, and whether DeepSeek extends its robotics ambitions to further seed deals as its own fundraising finalizes.
