DeepSeek invests $20.8 million in Unitree's Shanghai IPO

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has invested $20.8 million in robot maker Unitree, forming a partnership to jointly develop AI models for humanoid machines and overcome key development bottlenecks.

Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has invested 140.8 million yuan ($20.8 million) in robot maker Unitree and agreed ‌to jointly develop AI models for humanoid machines, according to a stock-exchange filing.

DeepSeek received 933,399 Unitree shares, representing 2.31% of the shares allocated through the Shanghai initial public offering's strategic placement. The companies, both based in China's ‌eastern tech hub of Hangzhou, said they would combine DeepSeek's expertise in AI models with Unitree's work ‌in mechanical engineering, motion control and embodied intelligence.

Unitree, also known as Yushu Technology, would give preference to DeepSeek when procuring model-training services and technical solutions. DeepSeek would similarly favour Unitree when purchasing robots or exploring embodied-AI applications, the filing said. The partnership targets ⁠a key ​bottleneck for humanoid developers: building ⁠a robot "brain" capable of understanding unfamiliar surroundings and reliably turning instructions into physical actions.

China has developed relatively inexpensive robots capable of walking, ⁠running and performing choreographed routines, but useful autonomous work requires models trained on scarce physical-world data, including demonstrations of ​manipulating objects and responding to changing environments. Chinese robot makers are operating data-collection facilities in which humans ⁠repeatedly guide humanoids through tasks such as folding clothes and opening doors.

DeepSeek's AI models have performed strongly on coding, mathematics and ⁠reasoning ​tests, while competing aggressively on price. But the company's strengths have been concentrated in language-model series rather than a multimodal system able to process vision alongside text. DeepSeek has released separate vision-language research models, including ⁠VL2, but they are not integrated into its flagship commercial model.

A DeepSeek researcher briefly published a ⁠project in April on improving ⁠visual reasoning through points and bounding boxes before the paper and official GitHub repository were withdrawn without a public explanation. The Unitree partnership could provide DeepSeek with ‌robots and physical-world ‌data to accelerate such work.