DeepSeek leads seed round in robotics startup Winverse at ~$400M valuation

Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek, so far known for lean open-weight models, is now investing in other companies. Its first notable bet is embodied AI. Winverse is in stealth, founded by an ex-Tencent AI scientist, with Meituan's Long-Z venture arm also in the round. A roughly $400M seed valuation is large even by 2026 AI standards.

The move fits DeepSeek's reported financial trajectory. Coverage says it is close to raising $12–15B led by Tencent and battery giant CATL at a $75B valuation, with a STAR Market listing targeted for 2027. That would turn DeepSeek from a hedge-fund research spinout into a well-capitalized platform able to back an ecosystem.

Competitively, robotics is the new front for Chinese labs. Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent all have embodied-AI efforts. DeepSeek is also releasing open-source tooling for Huawei Ascend chips to reduce CUDA dependence, which matters for any robotics stack that needs sovereign hardware.

Caveats: the fundraising figures are reported, not confirmed. On the community side, a widely shared r/DeepSeek thread accuses V4.1 Flash of exfiltrating API keys. That claim is unverified, but it is the kind of trust issue that could follow DeepSeek into new markets.