Huawei Hubble Backs Robotic Skin Startup as DeepSeek, HINA Place AI Hardware Bets

Vistra Robotics Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. completed its angel round with investors including Huawei's Hubble Investment, a fund under Shenzhen High-tech Investment, and Gaoxuan Investment. Duowei Capital served as exclusive financial adviser. The company is founded by Zhang Wei, born in 1998, who is pursuing a joint PhD between Southern University of Science and Technology and City University of Hong Kong, focusing on optical materials and robotics. Its team has an average age of about 23, with core members from SUSTech's intelligent liquid crystal optics laboratory, covering materials, device circuits and algorithms.

Vistra is developing a flexible electronic skin that combines flexible photonic crystals with photosensitive devices. The company says the skin can be less than 1 mm thick and achieve a sensing density of more than 10,000 points/cm². Its core material is a flexible photonic crystal represented by cholesteric liquid crystal elastomer (CLCE). The color is generated by periodic helical structures formed by liquid crystal molecules rather than pigments. When pressure deforms the material, the period changes, altering the reflected spectrum and color. Vistra's next-generation electronic skin combines a force-color-changing flexible photonic crystal, a transparent interlayer, a flexible TFT photosensor array and a backlight layer. The photonic crystal senses contact and deformation, while the flexible photosensor array reads optical signals. The design integrates optical reading components into the film structure, unlike conventional visuotactile sensors that require space for cameras.

The team has about 50 people and works in about 800 square meters of R&D and production space in Shenzhen, equipped with cleanrooms, 3D printing, CNC, laser processing, circuit placement and a self-built test platform. Within less than a year of founding, Vistra has established R&D and delivery systems for tactile sensors and data collection equipment, with customers including university laboratories at home and abroad, leading model companies and dexterous hand makers. It is also developing visuotactile, piezoresistive and capacitive sensors. In data collection, it has developed a visuotactile data-collection gripper, EGO data collection system and data-collection backpack. It is developing a tactile control model called an external tactile cerebellum to work with upper-level robot models such as VLA. In internal tests on tasks including erasing a blackboard and peg insertion, the company says success rates improved by up to nearly 100% after adding tactile cerebellum feedback. The new funding will support product development and commercialization.

Separately, Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek plans to lead a tens-of-millions-of-dollar seed round in Winverse AI, a robotics AI startup founded in 2026. The post-money valuation is about $400 million, or about RMB 2.8 billion. Meituan's Longzhu Capital also made an investment commitment. If completed, it would be one of the largest startup investments since DeepSeek was founded more than three years ago. Winverse AI founder Hu Han previously worked at Tencent, where he was a distinguished scientist responsible for vision-language and embodied intelligence foundation model teams. He also served as technical lead for Hunyuan language model and formed the Hunyuan voice team. His earlier roles included Baidu's Deep Learning Institute and Microsoft Research Asia. Hu was a co-contributor to Swin Transformer, a hierarchical vision Transformer architecture based on shifted windows proposed in 2021; the work won the ICCV 2021 best paper award. He was also named to MIT Technology Review's China 35 Innovators Under 35 list in 2022.

The investment follows DeepSeek's August participation in Unitree Robotics' IPO strategic placement. DeepSeek received about 933,400 shares at an issue price of RMB 150.80 per share, subscribing about RMB 141 million, with a 36-month lock-up. DeepSeek participated as an industrial strategic investor and signed a strategic cooperation memorandum with Unitree, planning joint R&D around AI large models and embodied intelligence. In June, DeepSeek completed its first external funding round, reportedly about $7.4 billion. Bloomberg reported on Oct. 6 that DeepSeek is raising at least RMB 80 billion in a new round, with the final size possibly approaching RMB 100 billion and a target valuation of about RMB 500 billion. Tencent and CATL are among participants. DeepSeek is preparing for an IPO in early 2027, possibly on the STAR Market, though the listing venue has not been formally determined. DeepSeek has not disclosed whether the two portfolio companies will cooperate technically, nor has it announced plans to develop its own robot products.

Leiphone reported that AI music generation and hardware company SUAVE completed a seed round in the tens of millions of RMB from HINA, a RMB fund set up by Haina Asia's China team. The funding will mainly be used for software and hardware R&D of mass-production models. This is HINA's first investment in the Chinese market. Haina Asia was the sole institutional angel investor in ByteDance and an early lead investor in Musical.ly, which ByteDance later acquired and renamed TikTok. SUAVE's team has been assembled, with members from ByteDance, Huawei HarmonyOS and Baidu. Founder Felix has an interdisciplinary background in engineering and music and was among China's first smart hardware entrepreneurs. He proposed a smart piano concept in 2012 and in 2014 led a smart piano and smart guitar project with light prompts that received investment from Tencent co-founder Zeng Liqing. He later worked at Pearl River Piano, ByteDance and Zuoyebang. At ByteDance, he was part of the former Smartisan (Nut) team and participated in internal projects including an AI recording card, robot dog smart pet and general robot.

SUAVE's core product is an AI music host that can be combined with different accessories to form a guitar, keyboard, DJ deck, wind instrument and dance scenarios, covering plucked, keyboard, percussion, wind and dance. The team calls the architecture a 1+N+X creation system: the host is the unified brain, accessories are expression entries, and software continuously adds ways to play. The design is similar to Nintendo Switch's concept of a fixed host base with accessories and software iterations. SUAVE plans to launch a guitar form first, with a host plus one core accessory expected to cost less than RMB 5,000. A demo exists, and the product is scheduled to launch in early 2027. The company says peers would need at least two years to replicate the integrated supply chain. On business model, SUAVE plans to use hardware sales as an entry point and generate revenue through software subscriptions, sound packs and paid apps, while building a work community open only to host users to support sharing and derivative works. It has started recruiting its first seed users, initially targeting music lovers around 20 to 30 years old with aesthetic and expressive desires who are willing to pay for experience, with particular attention to female users.