DeepSeek takes stakes in Unitree, Winverse AI and Tao Yu's startup instead of building robot hardware
The AMW Read
A DeepSeek case-study update: its first external lead seed investment and an IPO lock-up stake move it into robotics without hardware, reshaping the Chinese embodied-brain map, though deal sizes are modest.
DeepSeek takes stakes in Unitree, Winverse AI and Tao Yu's startup instead of building robot hardware
DeepSeek has made three investments in embodied AI. Its operating entity, Shenzhen-based Deepseek (深度求索), was allotted about RMB 141M (~$19.5M) in Unitree's STAR Market IPO strategic placement. It accepted a 36-month lock-up, while comparable strategic investors typically take 12 months. Unitree founder Wang Xingxing confirmed a strategic memorandum that gives the two companies priority on joint R&D, procurement and model-training adaptation. Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek plans to lead a seed round worth tens of millions of dollars in Winverse AI, a stealth startup founded by Swin Transformer corresponding author and former Tencent Hunyuan tech lead Han Hu, at a post-money valuation of about $400M. DeepSeek also appears among the backers of a new startup from Tao Yu, the former head of LimX Dynamics' humanoid foundation model. That company's valuation reportedly rose from about $70M in its first round to about $200M in its second.
Taken together, the deals show a frontier lab moving into physical AI by owning stakes rather than building hardware. Unitree supplies the robot body: the article says it holds over 30% of global humanoid shipments with gross margins near 60%. Its prospectus admits that its own embodied models have not reached scale, and Wang said Unitree first tested its robots with GPT-6. DeepSeek keeps the model and compute layers for itself. Winverse focuses on low-level inference acceleration, and Yu's team works on reinforcement-learning whole-body control. The timing follows DeepSeek's reported $15B raise this week, which gives it capital that would previously have looked out of character for the company to deploy.
For investors, the 36-month lock-up and priority-adaptation terms suggest that Chinese humanoid makers may choose their model partner at the IPO stage. Unitree's openness to GPT-6 shows that choice is still contested. For founders, a DeepSeek-led seed round at a $400M valuation for a team with no public product sets a high price for embodied-AI teams built around top researchers.
