DeepSeek plans to lead the investment in the AI company Winverse, with a valuation of approximately 400 million USD

According to Bloomberg, DeepSeek plans to lead a seed round for the robotics AI startup Winverse AI, which was established only a few months ago, with an amount in the tens of millions of dollars and a post-investment valuation of approximately 400 million dollars. Sources say that the Hangzhou research institution DeepSeek has agreed to lead this round of financing, with other committed investors including Long-Z Investments, a subsidiary of Meituan. The deal has not yet been finalized, and the valuation and list of investors may change.

Winverse was founded in 2026 by former Tencent scientist Hu Han and is currently in stealth mode. Hu Han previously served as the head of Tencent's Vision-Language and Embodied Foundation Models team and chief scientist, holding a PhD from Tsinghua University, with experience that includes Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu. When he left Tencent, the company was restructuring its AI research team. Neither Hu Han, DeepSeek, nor representatives from Long-Z have responded to inquiries.

This is one of the larger startup investments since Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek in 2023, aimed at extending its business into real-world applications such as humanoid robots for factories. Previously, DeepSeek also acquired about 2% of shares in Yushu Robotics during its Shanghai listing to collaborate on embodied intelligent models. DeepSeek is close to completing a new round of financing of at least 80 billion yuan, approximately 12 billion dollars, exceeding its original target, and plans to go public in early 2027, with funds primarily used for model training and data centers, and possibly for investing in the next generation of startups.