DeepSeek reopens $8B round at $74B, bets on humanoid robots
What's the deal? DeepSeek has restarted its Series B round, seeking close to $8bn at a valuation of about 500 billion yuan, or $74bn, Bloomberg reported. Monolith ManagementDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an early backer of Chinese AI firm MoonshotDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, is in talks to join.
Why now? The Hangzhou startup paused the process in July 2026 after leaked remarks from founder Liang Wenfeng to investors caused friction. Its valuation has since climbed from the roughly 350 billion yuan first external round earlier in summer 2026, which about doubled Liang's net worth to $36bn.
How big is this? An $8bn Series B places DeepSeek in the top 1% of all such rounds for its industry and region, based on a sample of 300 comparable deals. The lab that made its name on efficiency is now among the largest raisers in its class.
What's the money for? DeepSeek plans to spend part of it building its own data centres, led by a large facility in Inner Mongolia. On the same day the round resurfaced, it warned users of a significant price rise — quietly rewriting its own cheap-AI story.
What's the endgame? DeepSeek has invested 140.8 million yuan, about $20.8m, in Unitree Robotics' Shanghai listing, Reuters reported, buying 2.31% of the offering's strategic placement with a 36-month lock-up. The pair also signed a deal to jointly develop AI models for humanoid robots, matching DeepSeek's models with Unitree's work in motion control and embodied intelligence.
The pairing fills a gap. DeepSeek's models are strong on coding, maths, and reasoning, but that strength sits in language, not the multimodal systems that read the physical world. Unitree offers the missing half: robots and the scarce physical-world data they generate.
The IPO: Unitree priced its listing on Thursday, aiming to raise about 6.1 billion yuan, or $904m, at a valuation near $9bn, Reuters reported. That makes it the first humanoid-robot maker to list on the mainland, with existing backers tied to Tencent, Alibaba, and China MobileDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
What could go wrong? Unitree's price is steep. At 150.80 yuan a share, the offering carries a price-to-earnings ratio of 219, against an industry average near 39, according to Cailian Press. First-quarter profit, stripped of one-offs, fell 52.6% as costs climbed, and US sales — 13.3% of last year's revenue — sit exposed to fresh American curbs on Chinese robots.
The signal: DeepSeek is betting the next phase of AI will not be cheap at all. The company that proved models could be built on a budget is now raising billions, building compute, and moving into machines that move — leaving the question of whether the market that fell for the discount will pay the new price.
Read more: The Next Web
Image credit: Thiện Ân
