❯ DeepSeek reportedly leads the seed round of robot AI startup Winverse AI, valuing the months-old company at about $400 million

A $400 million seed roundAccording to ifeng.com, citing a Bloomberg report on October 12, DeepSeek is leading the seed round of robot AI startup Winverse AI. The round totals tens of millions of dollars and values the company at about $400 million. Meituan’s Long-Z Investments has committed to take part. People familiar with the matter said the deal is not final and that the valuation and investor lineup could change. DeepSeek, Long-Z and the founder did not respond to requests for comment.

A new company building AI for robotsWinverse AI was founded this year, has not appeared publicly, and builds AI for robots. Founder Hu Han was a chief scientist at Tencent, where he led the vision-language and embodied foundation model teams. He holds a PhD from Tsinghua University and previously worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu. Embodied models let a robot understand its surroundings and decide how to act. The company has not disclosed its products, customers or pricing.

Raised money starts flowing outThe report calls this one of DeepSeek’s largest startup investments. Bloomberg earlier reported that DeepSeek’s own latest round would raise at least RMB 80 billion, mainly for model training and data centers, with some possibly going to newer startups and joint research. Before this deal, DeepSeek subscribed for 2% of Unitree Robotics during its listing process to advance cooperation on embodied AI models.

A language model company reaches toward robotsDeepSeek’s main business is large language models, while robots need models that understand images, space and motion, with very different data and training. Backing an existing team is faster than building one from scratch and gives its models a route into real settings such as factory floors. The newly founded Winverse AI gains a lead investor that could also be a partner on models and compute.

▮ SIGNALWith large rounds in hand, model companies are starting to spend like big tech: training their own models while using investments to hold a position in the next field.