China's DeepSeek has invested 140.8 million yuan ($20.8 million) in robot maker Unitree's Shanghai initial public offering and agreed to jointly develop AI models for humanoid machines, according to a stock-exchange filing.
DeepSeek received 933,399 shares — 2.31% of the shares allocated through the IPO's strategic placement. Both companies are based in Hangzhou, China's eastern tech hub. Under the deal, Unitree will prefer DeepSeek when procuring model-training services, while DeepSeek will favor Unitree when buying robots or exploring embodied-AI applications.
The partnership targets the industry's core bottleneck: the robot 'brain.' China already builds relatively inexpensive humanoids that walk, run and perform choreographed routines, but useful autonomous work requires models trained on scarce physical-world data — demonstrations of folding clothes, opening doors and responding to changing environments. Chinese robot makers now operate data-collection facilities where humans repeatedly guide humanoids through such tasks.
DeepSeek's models excel at coding, mathematics and reasoning while competing aggressively on price, but its strengths are concentrated in language; its multimodal capabilities remain research-stage, and its flagship commercial model is not yet multimodal. The partnership could give DeepSeek the robots and real-world data needed to close that gap — and give Unitree, whose IPO opened a new chapter for China's robotics sector, a serious AI partner in the race to build robots that think and act.
