By Bloomberg News | Updated on Oct 12, 2026 at 12:42 PM
DeepSeek aims to lead the first round of investment for a months-old startup building AI for robots, deploying capital from its own $12 billion-plus financing to help bankroll one of the tech industry’s fastest-growing fields.
The Hangzhou-based research lab has agreed to spearhead a seed financing round amounting to tens of millions of dollars for Winverse AI, according to people familiar with the matter. Founded by a former top Tencent Holdings Ltd. scientist, the stealth startup has drawn commitments from other investors including Meituan’s Long-Z Investments that value the firm at about $400 million after the investment, the people said.
The transaction hasn’t been finalized and details such as valuation and investor participation could change, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.
The deal would mark one of DeepSeek’s largest startup bets since hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng founded the firm in 2023 and propelled it to industry stardom two years after. The deal helps the Chinese AI leader expand its footprint into real-world applications such as humanoid robots on factory floors. Before Winverse, DeepSeek also bought a 2% stake in Unitree Robotics ’s Shanghai listing to collaborate on embodied-intelligence models.
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DeepSeek to Raise Over $12 Billion in Tencent-Backed Funding |
DeepSeek is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan ($12 billion) in its latest round of funding, Bloomberg News has reported , blowing past its capital-raising target ahead of a market debut in early 2027. That capital was primarily intended for model training and data centers , but may also allow the AI lab to begin backing a new generation of startups for co-development.
Winverse was created in 2026 by Hu Han, who last served as head of Tencent’s vision-language and embodied foundation model teams as lead scientist. Holding a PhD from Tsinghua University, his career spans Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu Inc., according to his GitHub page . Hu’s departure from Tencent coincided with a restructuring of the WeChat-operator’s AI research team, a bid to catch up with rivals like DeepSeek and Moonshot.
Hu didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment. Representatives with DeepSeek and Long-Z didn’t respond to emailed queries.
China leads the world in building the arms and legs of humanoid robots — a dominance amplified by Unitree’s $900 million listing in August. But making them intelligent enough to respond to speech, solve real-world problems and perform tasks beyond sheer acrobatics requires different AI models than the ones popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT or DeepSeek.
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Skild AI and Physical Intelligence, US startups developing so-called general-purpose brains for robots, are valued at $14 billion and $5.6 billion , respectively. They’ve won the backing of tech leaders from Nvidia Corp. to Alphabet Inc. Investment liquidity is less ample in China, where Unitree and its ecosystem are constantly seeking capital to propel their next phases of research.
Hu belongs to a new generation of Chinese AI researchers who are increasingly leaving big tech firms to launch their own specialized labs — many falling under the broad category of world models aimed at autonomous driving, interactive video or robotics. Other prominent researchers who’ve founded their own labs include former Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Qwen tech lead Justin Lin and Tian Keyu, formerly an intern at ByteDance .
— Haze Fan , Zheping Huang