DeepSeek is reportedly set to lead an investment in Winverse AI, founded by a former Tencent AI scientist, at a post-money valuation of approximately $400 million.

BlockBeats news, October 12: According to Bloomberg, DeepSeek plans to lead the first round of funding for robotics AI startup Winverse AI, with the financing scale reaching tens of millions of dollars. After the deal is completed, Winverse AI is expected to be valued at approximately $400 million, and investors including Meituan's Long-Z Investments have also committed to participating. However, the deal has not yet been finalized, and the financing valuation and list of investors may still change.

Winverse AI was founded in 2026 by Hu Han, a former top scientist at Tencent. Hu Han previously served as chief scientist of Tencent's vision-language and embodied foundation model team, and also worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu.

This investment will become one of the larger startup investments since DeepSeek was founded, and also means its business layout is expanding from foundation model training to real-world application areas such as embodied intelligence and robotics. Bloomberg previously reported that DeepSeek is nearing completion of a new funding round of at least 80 billion yuan (approximately $12 billion), with the funds mainly used for model training and data center construction.