Filing: DeepSeek has invested ~$20.8M in Unitree Robotics' Shanghai IPO and agreed to jointly develop AI models for humanoid machines (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has invested $20.8 million in Unitree, a Shanghai-based robot manufacturer, according to a filing with the stock exchange. In the partnership, DeepSeek will share 2.31% of the units allocated through the company's strategic placement on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Both Hangzhou-based companies aim to combine DeepSeek's AI model expertise with Unitree's mechanical engineering, motion control, and embodied intelligence capabilities.

The collaboration seeks to address a significant challenge for humanoid robot developers: creating an AI model capable of understanding new environments and translating instructions into physical actions. China has produced robots capable of walking, running, and executing choreographed routines, but real-world usefulness requires models trained on scarce data about the physical world, including object manipulation and adapting to changing conditions.

DeepSeek's AI models have demonstrated strong performance on coding, mathematics, and reasoning tests, while maintaining competitive pricing. However, the company's main focus has been on language models rather than a multimodal system that can process both vision and text. DeepSeek has released separate vision-language research models, such as VL2, but they are not integrated into its primary commercial model.

A DeepSeek researcher recently published a project in April on enhancing visual reasoning using points and bounding boxes, but the paper and official GitHub repository were withdrawn without a public explanation. The partnership with Unitree could offer DeepSeek access to robots and physical-world data to accelerate advancements in this area.