DeepSeek is set to lead a seed round for Winverse, a robotics AI startup only a few months old, according to a Bloomberg report that cites people familiar with the matter. The round is worth tens of millions of dollars and would value the company at about $400 million after the investment.
The deal has not been finalised. The report says the valuation and investor participation could still change.
Winverse is still in stealth. It is building AI for robots, with the aim of supporting real-world uses such as humanoid robots on factory floors. The report notes that making robots respond to speech and solve real-world problems needs different AI models from those behind ChatGPT or DeepSeek.
Hu Han founded the company in 2026. He was previously lead scientist at Tencent and headed its vision-language and embodied foundation model teams. He holds a PhD from Tsinghua University and has worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu. His exit from Tencent coincided with a restructuring of the company’s AI research team. Meituan’s Long-Z Investments has also made commitments to the round.
This would be DeepSeek’s first lead role in a startup round, and it fits a pattern. The Hangzhou-based lab, founded in 2023 by hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, previously bought a 2% stake in Unitree Robotics’ Shanghai listing to work on embodied-intelligence models. DeepSeek is also raising money itself. It is reportedly close to securing at least 80 billion yuan (about $12 billion) in its latest round, ahead of a market debut in early 2027.
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