DeepSeek is set to lead the first funding round for Winverse AI, a young startup building AI for robots, Bloomberg reported on 12 October, citing people familiar with the matter. The deal is not yet final. Meituan’s Long-Z Investments is also among the reported backers.
- Post-money valuation
- ~$400MCompany value after the proposed investment.
- Seed funding
- Tens of millionsUS dollars reportedly being raised.
- Lead investor
- DeepSeekLong-Z is also among the reported backers.
$400 million is the proposed company valuation. The round itself is reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars. Bloomberg’s unnamed sources said terms could still change, including the valuation and who invests, according to Investing.com’s account.
The scientist behind Winverse
The report identifies Winverse’s founder as Hu Han, who previously led vision-language and embodied foundation model work at Tencent. 36Kr reported his departure in July, saying he was leaving to start a company.
Before Tencent, Hu worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu. His research profile lists a PhD from Tsinghua University and a long record in computer vision, including Swin Transformer, the paper he co-authored that won the best-paper award at ICCV in 2021.
Sources & references
- Bloomberg’s original Winverse AI report ↗
12 October 2026. Cites unnamed people familiar with the deal. Full text was unavailable during preparation; financing details were checked against Investing.com’s account below.
- Investing.com: DeepSeek to lead Winverse funding round ↗
12 October 2026. Coverage of Bloomberg’s reporting, rather than independent confirmation of the deal.
- Han Hu’s research profile and publications ↗
Career and research background. The profile uses the name Han Hu and still lists his Tencent role; the financing coverage uses Hu Han.
- 36Kr: Hu Han leaves Tencent to start a company ↗
23 July 2026. Earlier reporting on his departure from Tencent’s Hunyuan team.
