AI Funding

DeepSeek has agreed to lead the first funding round for Winverse AI, a months-old stealth startup building artificial intelligence for robots, Bloomberg reported on October 12, citing people familiar with the matter. The seed round amounts to tens of millions of dollars and would value Winverse at about 400 million dollars after the investment. Meituan's Long-Z Investments has also committed capital, according to the reports. One caution belongs up front: the deal has not closed, and the terms and the investor list could still change.

If you bought a slice of Anthropic or OpenAI on the secondary market, you might want to sit down. The labs just told the market, in unison, that your shares may not exist.

Anthropic and OpenAI both updated their stock-transfer policies this week to declare any share transfer made without board approval "void" — not voidable, void. A void transfer never legally happened. The buyer is not recognized as a shareholder and has no rights. OpenAI's language was nearly identical: transfers without written consent "will not be recognized and carry no economic value to you."

Every few months, venture capital finds a new reason to throw a fortune at a company that is barely a year old. This week's reason: a model that refuses to talk.

Meta tried to buy Manus for more than two billion dollars. Beijing said no. Now the agent startup has raised more than $500 million on its own terms, and the message to every founder with a hot model is clear: independence is suddenly a fundable strategy.

DeepSeek is about to become one of the best-funded AI startups on the planet. The Chinese lab is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan, roughly 12 billion dollars, in a funding round backed by Tencent and battery giant CATL, Bloomberg reported October 6, 2026. People familiar with the deal say signed term sheets could push the total toward 100 billion yuan, about 15 billion dollars.

Washington's latest bid to wire frontier AI into federal science work now has a price tag: 2.4 billion dollars. A White House fact sheet released October 8, 2026 says eleven industry partners have committed that total in science tools and compute credits to the Genesis Mission Consortium, a push to put modern AI capabilities behind federal research.