DeepSeek to lead seed round in robot AI startup Winverse AI at ~$400M valuation
DeepSeek has agreed to lead the seed round for Winverse AI, a months-old startup building AI for robots, in a deal worth tens of millions of dollars that would value the company at about $400 million post-money, Bloomberg reported. Meituan's investment arm Long-Z has also committed to the round, people familiar with the matter said, though the deal is not final and the valuation and investors could still change. Winverse was founded this year by Hu Han, who previously led Tencent's vision-language and robotics AI teams and has worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu; DeepSeek, Long-Z and Hu did not respond to requests for comment.
It would be one of DeepSeek's biggest bets on a startup and signals how Chinese model labs are pushing capital into robot foundation models, a field where US rivals are already valued in the billions.