DeepSeek to lead seed round in Winverse AI, a robot-AI start-up valued at about $400M

DeepSeek has agreed to lead the seed round of Winverse AI, a robot-AI start-up founded this year by former Tencent scientist Hu Han, Bloomberg reported on October 12, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter. The round is worth tens of millions of dollars and would value Winverse at about $400 million after the investment. Meituan’s investment arm, Long-Z, has also committed. The deal is not final, and the valuation and investor list could change.

Several headlines called it a “$400M seed”. That figure is the post-money valuation, not the size of the round. The more useful fact is the lead: it would follow DeepSeek’s stake in Unitree’s August IPO, this time at the model layer rather than in hardware.

Who is Hu Han, and what is Winverse building?

Hu Han, who publishes as Han Hu, is best known as co-first author and corresponding author of Swin Transformer, the vision backbone that won the Marr Prize for best paper at ICCV 2021. According to 36Kr, he earned his PhD in Tsinghua University’s Department of Automation in 2014, worked at Baidu, and joined Microsoft Research Asia in December 2016. At Tencent’s Hunyuan large-model team he led vision-language and embodied foundation model work, and he is listed as an author of the HY-Embodied-0.5 research released in April 2026. He resigned in July 2026, the month Tencent restructured Hunyuan.

Winverse has not said what it is building. Bloomberg describes it as a months-old start-up developing AI for robots. 36Kr reported that its team size, product and commercial progress are unclear, and cited people suggesting it may focus on underlying infrastructure such as model acceleration rather than embodied intelligence in the narrow sense. DeepSeek, Long-Z and Hu did not respond to Bloomberg’s requests for comment.

Why is DeepSeek investing in robot AI?

It already has a foot in hardware. DeepSeek took 933,399 shares for RMB 140.8 million as a strategic investor in Unitree’s August 2026 Shanghai IPO, alongside an agreement under which Unitree prioritises DeepSeek for AI development and DeepSeek prioritises Unitree for robots and embodied-intelligence solutions. A stake in Winverse would add the layer between the two: a team led by a vision-language researcher, in a field where the leading robot foundation models are being built by much larger labs.

The cheque is small against DeepSeek’s own fundraising. Bloomberg, as cited by The Next Web, reported that DeepSeek is close to raising at least $12 billion in a round backed by Tencent ahead of a planned early-2027 listing, mostly for model training and data centres. A seed lead of tens of millions of dollars buys an option on robotics talent and an early look at the problems a robot-AI lab runs into, at little cost to that budget.