Winverse AI is a 2026 startup building artificial intelligence for robots. Quartz, relaying Bloomberg’s reporting from unnamed sources, says DeepSeek is moving to lead its seed financing at a proposed valuation of roughly $400 million after the investment.
The available product description is broad: AI for robots. Quartz does not identify a released model, customer or deployment. It says the wider field is trying to build models that let machines interpret speech and perform complex real-world tasks, but that context is not evidence that Winverse has delivered those capabilities.
Founder Hu Han established Winverse after leading Tencent’s vision-language and embodied-foundation-model teams as a scientist. His earlier work included Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu, and he holds a doctorate from Tsinghua University. Quartz provides no additional detail on what Winverse is building or how it expects to sell it.
The financing remains provisional. Quartz says Meituan’s Long-Z Investments has also reportedly committed, but the valuation and final investor roster could change. The report does not disclose how much Winverse would raise, so the roughly $400 million figure is a post-money valuation, not the round size.
A Winverse deal would extend DeepSeek’s activity in robotics. Quartz says the model developer previously took a 2.31% strategic stake in humanoid-robot maker Unitree Robotics before its August Shanghai listing and accepted a 36-month lockup. It also places Winverse beside United States general-purpose robot-AI developers Skild AI and Physical Intelligence, valued at $14 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively. Because Winverse’s reported product scope is much less specific, those are market markers rather than like-for-like comparisons.
Published versions remain available when an article is updated or corrected.
- Revision 1 · Initial publication
Initial publication