China AI startup DeepSeek has invested 140.8 million yuan ($20.8 million) in robot maker Unitree and agreed to jointly develop AI models for humanoid robots, Reuters reported on Aug. 6 local time.

DeepSeek received 933,399 shares, or a 2.31 percent stake, from a strategic allotment ahead of Unitree’s Shanghai initial public offering, the report said.

The two companies agreed to combine DeepSeek’s AI model expertise with Unitree’s capabilities in mechanical engineering, motion control and embodied intelligence through the partnership.

Unitree will give priority to DeepSeek when procuring model training services and technology solutions, and DeepSeek will give priority to Unitree when exploring robot purchases or embodied AI applications, Reuters reported.

The partnership focuses on addressing a key bottleneck faced by humanoid developers: building robot “brains” that can understand unfamiliar environments and reliably translate instructions into physical actions.

China has already made relatively inexpensive robots that can walk, run and perform choreography, but useful autonomous work requires models trained on scarce real-world physical data, such as demonstrations of object manipulation or responses to changing environments.

Chinese robot companies are operating data-collection facilities where humans repeatedly teach robots tasks such as folding clothes or opening doors.

DeepSeek’s AI models show strength in coding, math and reasoning tests, and are low-priced. But DeepSeek has focused on language-model systems rather than multimodal systems that process text and visuals together.

DeepSeek has released separate vision-language research models such as VL2, but has not integrated them into its main commercial models.