Liang Wenfeng has invested in the author of Swin Transformer, and DeepSeek has started to make layout for the embodied brain.

What? DeepSeek is pouring money into robotics companies again?!

After investing about 141 million yuan in Unitree Robotics in August this year, Liang Wenfeng has now set his sights on a fledgling robotics AI startup—

Winverse AI.

According to Bloomberg, DeepSeek plans to lead its tens of millions of dollars seed round financing.

The post-investment valuation is about 400 million US dollars, equivalent to about 2.8 billion yuan.

Winverse AI was established just this year. Its founder Hu Han once led the research on vision-language and embodied intelligence foundational models at Tencent.

It is worth mentioning that this is DeepSeek's second investment in the robotics sector in just two months.

In August this year, DeepSeek just invested about 141 million yuan in Unitree Robotics, and the two parties also plan to carry out cooperation around embodied intelligence, robotics and large models.

Now, DeepSeek has shifted its investment focus to the AI model teams behind robotics.

If the financing is completed, it will become one of the largest startup investments since DeepSeek was founded.

Ex-Tencent scientist starts a business, DeepSeek leads a tens of millions of dollars investment

Let's first take a look at the company that DeepSeek is willing to pay for.

Winverse AI was founded in 2026 and is still in the early R&D stage, with no specific products and technical routes publicly disclosed yet.

In contrast, its founder Hu Han (Han Hu) has accumulated a lot of achievements in his academic and industrial experience—

According to Hu Han's personal academic homepage, he graduated from Tsinghua University with a bachelor's degree in 2008.

He obtained his doctorate in 2014, and then successively engaged in research work at Baidu Deep Learning Institute and Microsoft Research Asia.

In December 2023, Hu Han joined Tencent Hunyuan as a Distinguished Scientist, leading the vision-language model (VLM) and embodied intelligence foundational model teams.

During his time at Tencent, he also served as the technical lead of the Hunyuan large language model and established the Hunyuan speech team.

In terms of academic research, one of Hu Han's most representative achievements is Swin Transformer in the field of computer vision.

In 2021, as one of the co-contributors of the paper, Hu Han and the team proposed a hierarchical vision Transformer architecture based on shifted windows.

This research improves the computational efficiency of Transformer when processing high-resolution images, enabling it to be better applied to various vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation.

With this achievement, the team won the ICCV 2021 Best Paper Award, which is also one of the representative academic honors in the field of computer vision:

In addition, Hu Han was selected into the 2022 MIT Technology Review China "35 Innovators Under 35" list.

Looking back at his research experience, a relatively clear technical path can be seen—

In the early stage, he mainly focused on research on computer vision and vision foundational models, then gradually moved into multimodal large models, and further participated in the R&D of embodied intelligence foundational models during his time at Tencent.

These research directions are strongly related to the visual perception, environmental understanding and task execution capabilities required for robotics AI, which also provides technical accumulation for him to found Winverse AI.

As for financing, according to Bloomberg, DeepSeek plans to lead a tens of millions of dollars seed round financing for Winverse AI, and Longzhu Capital under Meituan has also made an investment commitment.

If the transaction is successfully completed, it will be a relatively large-scale investment in startups for DeepSeek in the more than three years since its establishment.

There is another noteworthy background behind this financing—

It is understood that Tencent is also one of the potential investors in DeepSeek's new round of financing. Now, the robotics AI company founded by the former Tencent scientist has attracted the attention of DeepSeek and Meituan-affiliated capital.

From large model technology R&D to embodied intelligence entrepreneurship, the talent and capital links between leading technology companies have begun to extend more to the robotics field.

For DeepSeek, this investment also continues its layout in the robotics sector since the beginning of this year.

From financing to investment, DeepSeek ramps up efforts in robotics

Since the beginning of this year, DeepSeek's moves in the capital market have increased significantly.

In June this year, DeepSeek completed its first round of external financing since its establishment.

According to reports, the scale of its first round of external financing is about 7.4 billion US dollars, ending the stage where it relied on HFQuant to provide financial support for a long time.

Two months later, DeepSeek appeared on the IPO strategic placement list of Unitree Robotics.

According to the strategic placement results announced by Unitree Robotics on August 6th, DeepSeek was allocated about 933,400 shares. Calculated at the issue price of 150.80 yuan per share, the subscription amount is about 141 million yuan, and the share lock-up period is 36 months.

In this placement, DeepSeek participated as an industrial strategic investor, and signed a strategic cooperation memorandum with Unitree Robotics at the same time.

The two parties plan to carry out joint R&D around AI large models and embodied intelligence, focusing on exploring how to improve robots' ability to understand complex environments, as well as their generalization ability when facing different tasks and scenarios.

At the specific business level—

When DeepSeek carries out exploration related to embodied intelligence, it will give priority to Unitree's robot products and technical solutions under the same conditions. When Unitree carries out model adaptation, training and integration development, it will also give priority to DeepSeek's technical services.

In addition, DeepSeek will provide support in model architecture, intelligent computing cluster construction, data center operation and other aspects according to actual needs.

In October, new progress has been made in DeepSeek's own financing and listing plans.

According to a Bloomberg report on October 6, DeepSeek is raising at least 800 billion yuan in a new round of financing, and the final scale may be close to 1 trillion yuan, with a target valuation of about 5 trillion yuan.

Companies including Tencent and CATL are also participating in this round. An important background of this financing is that DeepSeek is preparing to launch its IPO in early 2027, and the listing location may choose the STAR Market, which has not been officially determined yet.

Now, two months later, DeepSeek has set its sights on Winverse AI, which specializes in robotics foundational models.

The technical directions involved in the two investments are also different.

The technical accumulation of Unitree mainly focuses on robot ontology, motion control and hardware platforms, which can provide a real operating carrier for embodied intelligence technology.

Winverse AI focuses its R&D direction on robotics foundational models, which is closer to the environmental perception, understanding and decision-making capabilities of robots.

One focuses on the "body" of the robot, while the other targets the "brain" of the robot.

At present, DeepSeek has not disclosed whether there is a technical cooperation plan between the two companies, nor has it announced independent R&D of robot products.

However, with successive investments in robot ontology enterprises and embodied intelligence model teams, DeepSeek's layout in the robotics field has begun to take shape.

Reference Links:

[1]https://ancientmooner.github.io/

[2]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-12/deepseek-backs-ex-tencent-ai-scientist-s-400-million-robot-lab

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "QbitAI", written by Meng Yao, authorized for release by 36Kr.