DeepSeek Reportedly Plans to Lead Winverse AI Seed Round at $400 Million Valuation

DeepSeek reportedly plans to lead a seed financing round for Winverse AI, a startup developing AI for robots founded by former Tencent scientist Han Hu. The proposed deal would value the company at approximately $400 million after the investment, according to Bloomberg.

Key Takeaways

Show all

• Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek has agreed to lead a seed round of tens of millions of dollars for Winverse AI.
• The roughly $400 million figure is the proposed post-investment valuation, not the amount being raised.
• The transaction has not been finalized, and its terms and investor participation could change.
• Founder Han Hu previously led Tencent’s vision-language and embodied foundation-model teams.

A proposed bet on robot intelligence

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that Winverse has also attracted commitments from other investors, including Meituan’s Long-Z Investments. The months-old company remains in stealth, and the report does not detail a product launch or technical architecture.

The distinction between the round size and valuation is significant: investors would collectively provide tens of millions of dollars, while valuing the business at around $400 million once that investment is included. Bloomberg says the transaction is still subject to change. Hu, DeepSeek and Long-Z did not respond to its requests for comment.

For the robotics industry, the potential investment is notable because it would bring backing from a major AI model developer to a company focused on robot intelligence. It does not, by itself, establish how DeepSeek’s models might be used by Winverse or whether the companies would jointly develop technology.

From computer vision to embodied AI

Hu’s personal research page documents a career spanning computer vision, language models and embodied AI. It identifies him as the head of Tencent’s vision-language and embodied foundation-model teams, with earlier roles at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu Research. He holds a doctorate from Tsinghua University and was an author of Swin Transformer, which won the ICCV 2021 best paper award.

The page uses the name Han Hu, while Bloomberg refers to him as Hu Han. It still lists his Tencent position; the account of his departure and creation of Winverse in 2026 comes from Bloomberg’s reporting.

Winverse would join a growing field of companies developing the intelligence needed to make robots useful across tasks and environments. The commercial challenge extends beyond understanding an instruction to carrying it out reliably on physical hardware. For now, the news concerns the capital and research talent behind that effort: Winverse’s capabilities and deployment plans remain to be detailed publicly.