Liang Wenfeng moves into VC as DeepSeek leads Winverse AI seed round
Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek has agreed to lead the seed round of Winverse AI, an embodied-AI startup founded by former Tencent scientist Hu Han, at tens of millions of dollars and a post-money valuation of about $400 million, though people familiar said the deal is not final and the amount, valuation and investor lineup could still change. The report also said Yu Tao, formerly head of foundation models at LimX Dynamics, has started a company combining LLMs with embodied AI, valued at $70 million in a first round and $200 million in a second, with DeepSeek among the investors; separately, Liang Wenfeng is said to be weighing whether DeepSeek builds its own embodied-AI team or enters via investment. The article ties the timing to GPT-6 Astra's general model capabilities, visibly slowing growth in coding ability, a cooling funding environment for embodied AI and a queue of roughly 40 to 50 robotics-related companies waiting to list in Hong Kong.
If completed, the deal would be an unusual move by DeepSeek to lead a bet on embodied AI, signaling where large-model companies are looking next as coding gains slow.