Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has agreed to lead a seed round for Winverse AI, a robot AI start-up founded by an ex-Tencent scientist, at a valuation of about $400 million.
Key Points:
- DeepSeek is set to lead a seed round worth tens of millions of dollars in Winverse AI.
- Hu Han, who ran robotics AI teams at Tencent, founded the start-up this year.
- The deal is not final, and the roughly $400 million valuation could still change.
DeepSeek Backs Winverse
The seed round is worth tens of millions of dollars and would value Winverse at about $400 million after the investment, people familiar with the matter said. Meituan's investment arm, Long-Z, has also committed. The deal is not final, and both the valuation and the list of investors could still change.
Winverse is only months old.
Hu Han founded it this year after leading Tencent's vision-language and robotics AI teams as a scientist. He holds a PhD from Tsinghua University and has worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu. His exit came as Tencent, the operator of WeChat, reshuffled its AI research group to catch up with rivals such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.
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Robotics Push
The investment would rank among DeepSeek's biggest bets on a start-up since hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng founded the lab in 2023. It would also push the lab toward real-world uses such as humanoid robots working on factory floors.
China has built a strong base for producing humanoid robot hardware. Giving those machines AI that can follow speech and handle complex real-world tasks remains a separate and less developed field.
U.S. start-ups Skild AI and Physical Intelligence, backed by Nvidia and Alphabet, are reportedly valued at $14 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively.
DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan, or about $12 billion, beating its original goal of about 50 billion yuan, ahead of a planned stock market debut in early 2027. Most of that money was earmarked for model training and data centers, but some could fund start-up deals built around joint development.
Winverse would not be DeepSeek's first robotics bet. In August, the lab paid 140.8 million yuan, about $20.8 million, for a 2.31% stake in Unitree Robotics before the humanoid maker listed in Shanghai. It agreed to a 36-month lock-up, triple what most other strategic investors accepted, and analysts saw the stake as a partnership rather than a play for returns.
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