A financing round that could serve as a bellwether has just been completed.

Recently, DeepSea Zhiren (DeepSea Intelligence) announced the closing of a Series A financing round of over RMB 500 million, with an impressive lineup of investors:

New shareholders include Guanghe Capital, Fortune Capital, GGV Capital, Yida Capital, Zhongbao Investment, CETC Investment, and the Energy Technology Fund managed by Cathay Capital with TotalEnergies as a major limited partner. Meanwhile, existing shareholders including Zhengxuan Investment, Yunze Capital, Yunshi Capital, Gaojie Capital, and Xingzhi Capital all made significant follow‑on investments.

Investment World obtained a set of data: as of July this year, DeepSea Zhiren has signed new sales contracts for complete deep‑sea robots worth several hundred million yuan. In the next two months, confirmed orders waiting to be signed are also at the same scale, and potential orders worth RMB 1 billion are under deep negotiation.

What the outside world may not know is that this Chinese deep‑sea robot company has already been making global inroads. Behind it stands a veteran of the deep‑sea technology sector – Ma Yiming. Three years ago, he led DeepSea Zhiren from the Greater Bay Area to the forefront of the global ocean industry, using hard‑core orders to etch the company's footprint into the global deep‑sea technology landscape.

Robots diving into the deep sea mark the beginning of a grand narrative intertwining global deep‑sea exploration and robotics.

Top VCs and PE Firms Converge
A Bellwether

The list of Series A investors deserves a closer look.

First, four leading market‑oriented VCs – Guanghe Capital, Fortune Capital, GGV Capital, and Yida Capital – are making their first foray into the deep‑sea sector, reflecting the primary market's judgment that the industry has reached an inflection point.

This aligns with the view of Professor Li Zexiang, often called the "godfather of entrepreneurship": the next phase of AI needs to combine with real‑world scenarios – that is, AI + hardware + scenarios, which is one frontier of embodied intelligence. He believes that from maritime to land to aerial domains, one must fully understand user needs and pain points, but the constant factor is market implementation.

That is why top VCs have collectively appeared behind a deep‑sea robot company. For them, this is not a random trial but a strategic layout based on long‑term research and evaluation, signaling the landing of embodied intelligence in deep‑sea scenarios.

"Our sincerity in making three visits to the thatched cottage moved the company," recalled Cai Wei, a partner at Guanghe Capital. When the team first approached DeepSea Zhiren, the latter was not strongly inclined to raise funds. So the Guanghe Capital team took turns spending time at the company, discussing their industry understanding with the founder from an investor's perspective, while also advising on overseas client introductions, future development planning, product iteration, engineering systems, and technology roadmaps, ultimately facilitating this investment.

"Singularity" Deep‑Sea Work‑Class Robot

What the GGV Capital team saw was the infinite potential beneath the sea surface. As human technology advances, we are constantly expanding the boundaries of economic activity. In recent years, the deep‑sea economy has become a new high ground in global strategic competition: offshore oil and gas development, submarine communications, offshore wind power, and emerging trillion‑dollar industries such as seabed mineral resource development and underwater data centres are creating a huge market for deep‑sea robots. "With the DeepSea Zhiren team's integrated capabilities in AI and robot hardware/software, as well as commercial deployment in oil and gas, mining, and underwater data centre scenarios, the DeepMatrix platform is expected to redefine the efficiency and service model of deep‑sea operations, creating a new business model of sustained operation and long‑term recurring purchases."

State‑owned capital also joined the bet – Zhongbao Investment and CETC Investment. Zhongbao Investment serves as the manager of the China Insurance Investment Fund, with one of its missions being "to support national economic development strategies." CETC Investment is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, positioned as a "core strategic investment support unit." The simultaneous appearance of two state‑owned investors in one financing round represents, to some extent, recognition from a national strategic perspective.

An industry signal came from Cathay Capital's participation. Investment World learned that the DeepSea Zhiren team made a special trip to Shanghai to meet with the global chairman of TotalEnergies. After in‑depth assessment of the company's technical strength, product capabilities, and commercialisation prospects, the Cathay Energy Technology Fund, with TotalEnergies as a cornerstone LP, ultimately decided to invest. At the same time, DeepSea Zhiren's technology and products have gained further access to TotalEnergies' global deep‑water projects, opening up more international commercialisation opportunities.

The endorsement from a global energy giant speaks volumes – in the field of global deep‑water oil and gas development, TotalEnergies is one of the most influential players, and its selection of deep‑sea equipment suppliers is notoriously stringent.

Zhang Li, a partner at Cathay Capital, noted that what makes DeepSea Zhiren unique is that on one end it is rooted in the most difficult‑to‑replicate engineering system under extreme environments, and on the other, it redefines the paradigm of deep‑sea operations through intelligent models and multi‑robot collaboration. "We believe this is not just a growth opportunity for a deep‑sea robot company, but also represents an important direction for AI to enter the real industrial world and drive paradigm shifts in ocean development."

In addition, a host of existing shareholders made large follow‑on investments. In the current primary market, where caution prevails, collective follow‑on investments from existing shareholders usually indicate strong recognition of the company's growth trajectory and certainty.

Looking back at DeepSea Zhiren's financing history, this trend becomes even clearer: as early as May 2023, the company completed its angel round led by Zhengxuan Investment and Shenzhen High‑tech Investment; in July 2024, it completed a Pre‑A round led by Guangzhou Finance Holdings and Gaojie Capital; and from April to June 2025, it secured over RMB 100 million in a Pre‑A+ round led by Yunze Capital and Yunshi Capital.

The closing of this over‑RMB‑500‑million Series A round is a core signal that the primary market is voting with real money, confirming the long‑term deterministic value of the deep‑sea track. An early‑stage investor remarked: "DeepSea Zhiren is the only project among those we've invested in where every target set after a meeting is either met or exceeded by the next meeting. That kind of certainty is invaluable in hard‑tech entrepreneurship."

A Benchmark Case of a Deep‑Sea Robot Rising
Overseas Orders Explode

The most basic consensus in the venture capital community is that investing is investing in people.

Ma Yiming is undoubtedly the soul of DeepSea Zhiren. He graduated in Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering from Harbin Engineering University in 2013, and has been inseparable from the deep sea ever since. He later worked for a long time at an internationally renowned deep‑sea robot company as the lead technical architect, and was also the first domestic industrial talent to systematically introduce European and American deep‑sea robot technologies.

Notably, he also participated in the formulation of several national standards for underwater robots, contributed to the world's first commercial deep‑sea mining robot "Nautilus", and led major R&D projects such as ultra‑deep‑water work‑class ROV systems and China's first heavy‑duty seabed operation robot, driving the introduction, innovation, and commercialisation of core deep‑sea robot technologies.

Years later, recalling his early days in the industry, Ma Yiming still has vivid memories: unlike the scattered, workshop‑like "prototypes" he had seen in university labs, the rows of heavy‑duty deep‑sea robots in the workshop looked like steel giants lined up in formation. "It was a disruptive shock to our understanding – like someone from a repair shop suddenly walking into Volkswagen's assembly line."

Not until 2023 did that long‑buried impact become the most direct driving force behind Ma Yiming's determination to develop deep‑sea robots independently. So he embarked on his entrepreneurial journey, and DeepSea Zhiren was born.

As is well known, the deep sea at thousands of metres presents five extreme constraints simultaneously: hundreds of times atmospheric pressure, high salt corrosion, dark and turbid conditions, unpredictable ocean currents, and acoustic communication delays. Looking at the current domestic marine robot market, most companies focus on consumer‑grade or light‑industrial underwater robots, with operating depths generally less than 100 metres – meaning they can only perform limited functions and are completely unsuitable for deep‑sea operations.

From the very beginning, DeepSea Zhiren has focused on the industrial deep‑sea market, where the scarcity is truly valuable. The reason is clear: work‑class ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles), capable of operating in kilometre‑ to multi‑kilometre‑deep high‑pressure environments, are indispensable "national heavy equipment" for deep‑sea oil and gas development, submarine communications, offshore wind power, seabed infrastructure construction, and future deep‑sea mining.

However, one cannot ignore the somewhat glaring fact that this "national heavy equipment" has long been dominated by European and American companies, leaving China's high‑end deep‑sea robots reliant on international brands and foreign technology systems. What DeepSea Zhiren aims to do is break this situation and achieve a breakthrough for original Chinese technology on a global scale.

The difficulty is enormous. On one hand, the technical architectures of land‑based robots and shallow‑water observation equipment cannot be directly reused; all propulsion, control, and sealing systems must be developed from scratch for the deep‑sea environment, with individual technology development cycles typically measured in years. On the other hand, European and American manufacturers possess complete standards systems covering hundreds of thousands of components, from design and supply chain management to testing, verification, and project delivery – a chasm that domestic companies face.

At the start, DeepSea Zhiren abandoned the shortcut of building quick prototypes and spent time establishing over 300 internal standard manuals, fully benchmarking top international offshore engineering specifications, and filling the gaps in complete delivery systems that domestic companies lacked. "This intangible digital asset has become a core competitiveness that pure hardware integrators and algorithm teams cannot replicate in the short term."

Moreover, unlike the industry's previous model of buying core components and simply assembling them, DeepSea Zhiren insists on full‑chain independent development of pressure‑resistant structures, hydraulic manipulators, underwater navigation, underlying control systems, and intelligent algorithms. It also uses a modular hardware architecture, where a common base covers 90% of industry needs, and the remaining 10% can be expanded with functional modules as required, significantly reducing costs.

"Phoenix 600" Deep‑Sea Suspended Work‑Class Robot

Thanks to this approach, DeepSea Zhiren's first product, the "Taurus" deep‑sea heavy‑duty work robot, went from concept design to final assembly and testing in just 10 months – compared with the typical 18‑20 month cycle for European and American companies. Notably, the first "Taurus" was deployed in the State Power Investment Corporation's Zhanjiang Wailuo offshore wind farm project and achieved "zero‑failure" continuous operation on its very first application.

Today, DeepSea Zhiren has built a product matrix covering all deep‑sea operation scenarios, including:

"Singularity" Deep‑Sea Work‑Class Robot (operating depth: 6,000 metres);

"Phoenix" Deep‑Sea Suspended Work‑Class Robot (operating depth: 3,000 metres);

"Taurus" Deep‑Sea Heavy‑Duty Work‑Class Robot (operating depth: 1,000 metres);

DeepMatrix seabed‑resident unmanned robot swarm solution, which also includes Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and the SEAgent deep‑sea mission decision‑making large model system.

A landmark moment came in the summer of 2025, when DeepSea Zhiren won an order from the UAE's telecom group to deliver a deep‑sea robot, the "Phoenix 600", valued at nearly USD 10 million. In October of the same year, based on the positive experience with the first "Phoenix", the UAE telecom group placed a follow‑up order, achieving "1+2" consecutive procurement.

"Phoenix 600" in Deep‑Sea Live Operation

The story behind this is little known. Ma Yiming admitted that the client was initially unfamiliar with DeepSea Zhiren, so he personally led the team to Dubai to demonstrate the "Phoenix 600" on site. This robot is a complete suspended deep‑sea cable and pipe burial system, with a maximum diving depth of 3,000 metres – representing the deepest commercial waters. Its entire design, testing, and delivery systems are benchmarked against top European and American standards, and it is fully independently developed by DeepSea Zhiren, empowered by AI.

The UAE telecom's expert team later came to China for an in‑depth assessment: they reviewed full‑process technical documentation for projects like "Taurus"; randomly visited more than a dozen core suppliers to inspect process documents and quality records; and held marathon technical debriefings with DeepSea Zhiren's mechanical, electrical, software, and hydraulic teams, leaving no doubt about the company's technical strengths.

In the end, DeepSea Zhiren did not rely on low‑price competition but won over the Middle Eastern client with a "flawless" technical solution, beating industry giants from the UK, the Netherlands, Norway, and other countries – achieving a zero‑breakthrough for commercial exports of Chinese deep‑sea robots. Later that same year, DeepSea Zhiren also secured an order from a central state‑owned enterprise for submarine cable operation robots, marking the first time a domestic central SOE has purchased fully domestically produced local‑brand deep‑sea robots – a milestone of great significance.

To date, DeepSea Zhiren has not only captured the majority of domestic commercial complete‑machine orders, but is also the only private company in China to have successfully sold complete deep‑sea robot systems commercially. Its clients span the three most demanding mainstream sectors – international oil and gas contractors, submarine cable communications contractors, and wind power contractors – across dozens of countries including the UK, Netherlands, Norway, Brazil, Australia, UAE, Egypt, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Angola.

In retrospect, the rise of DeepSea Zhiren is the complete narrative of a Chinese technology exemplar: it did not follow the traditional path of "introduce‑digest‑absorb‑re‑innovate", but chose a harder road – building a complete system from scratch and using independent technology to create a new paradigm for humans to understand and develop the deep sea.

China's Original Strength

Is Conquering the 10,000‑Metre Deep Sea

The industry curtain has risen

In 2025, the government work report for the first time listed "deep‑sea technology" as a key area of strategic emerging industries, alongside commercial aerospace and the low‑altitude economy. Meanwhile, "strengthening marine development, utilisation, and ecological protection" was formally written into the "15th Five‑Year Plan" outline, and deep‑sea exploration was also positioned as an important lever for cultivating new quality productive forces and safeguarding national resource security. Not long ago, the Ministry of Natural Resources also proposed implementing deep‑sea projects to enhance capabilities for deep‑sea entry, exploration, development, and safety, and to accelerate the improvement of deep‑sea mineral resource and genetic resource development and utilisation.

This has far‑reaching implications. Innovation in deep‑sea technology directly affects a nation's capacity for deep‑sea development, which is critical to energy independence, strategic resource security, and international competition for global maritime influence.

Currently, humanity has explored less than 0.1% of the total ocean area. Even just deep‑sea mining holds staggering potential – a report by UBS in November 2025 estimated the total potential value of global deep‑sea mineral resources at between USD 177 trillion and 280 trillion.

In Ma Yiming's view, "What we are doing is essentially forging a fundamental capability for the nation and for humanity – the ability to freely enter, comprehensively understand, and effectively develop the blue territory that covers 71% of the Earth's surface." The team understands that their path is not simply about overlaying AI algorithms onto robots, but about enabling deep‑sea robots to possess environmental perception, mission understanding, autonomous decision‑making, collaborative execution, and continuous evolution in extreme environments – thus achieving true embodied intelligence in the ocean.

As early as December last year, DeepSea Zhiren began planning its technology roadmap for the next 5‑10 years, launching the DeepMatrix seabed‑resident unmanned robot swarm solution, with the "fully electric‑driven resident seabed robot swarm + SEAgent ocean embodied intelligence brain" system, aiming to completely reshape the underlying model of deep‑sea development and create a new ecosystem.

Subsequently, in March this year, DeepSea Zhiren released the first deep‑sea robot mission decision‑making large model – SEAgent – which can parse natural language, complete information, assess mission readiness, and produce structured outputs, opening an intelligent gateway from human operational needs to robot systems, with the capability for continuous learning and evolution. This marks the advancement of deep‑sea robots from individual units to "ocean embodied intelligence + multi‑agent collaboration."

In simple terms, for future deep‑sea mining scenarios, deep‑sea robots will no longer require expensive mother ships to accompany them for long periods, nor large numbers of certified operators to remotely control them in real time, nor will they be constrained by weather windows. Humans will only need to propose operational goals from onshore bases, and the underwater swarm will autonomously complete all exploration surveys, installation and maintenance, asset inspection, and emergency response tasks.

DeepSea Zhiren estimates that deploying the DeepMatrix resident swarm at a single offshore oil and gas field could save billions of dollars in vessel and labour costs over the 25‑year life cycle of the field, reducing the cost of extracting a single barrel of offshore oil and gas by USD 5‑10. By 2029, it is expected to complete the world's first commercial fully autonomous seabed resident swarm deployment, taking the lead in large‑scale unmanned operations in deep‑sea oil and gas fields. And the market potential for deep‑sea mining is several times larger than that for oil and gas fields for the DeepMatrix swarm.

Data shows that the current global subsea services market size is RMB 1.5 trillion, with an annual growth rate exceeding 20%. Facing this high‑growth blue ocean, DeepSea Zhiren's goal is equally clear – to reshape the industry landscape with fully unmanned deep‑sea robot solutions and become a leader in this deep blue frontier.

If hardware determines the depth to which humans can reach the deep sea, then intelligent systems will determine the height to which they can develop and utilise it. DeepSea Zhiren is using the multi‑pronged drive of "hardware + deep‑sea embodied large model + scenarios" to build the ecological foundation for deep‑sea development. The original definition of this underlying paradigm for deep‑sea development is of incalculable scarcity value.

As Guanghe Capital partner Cai Wei noted, the deep sea is one of the most challenging application scenarios for AI to enter the real world. "DeepSea Zhiren's DeepMatrix plan fundamentally changes the high‑cost, high‑risk model that relies heavily on mother ships and manual labour. It precisely addresses the core pain points of marine development – high vessel charter costs, communication latency bottlenecks, and complex physical coordination – successfully achieving a paradigm shift from 'single remote‑controlled tools' to 'ocean embodied intelligence + multi‑agent collaboration.'"

Having long been at the forefront of the industry, Ma Yiming firmly believes that China has enough talent and industrial resources to nurture several world‑class original and leading companies in the field. "DeepSea Zhiren aims to be the 'wise human' that replaces human beings in developing the deep sea."

Beneath the deep sea, Chinese strength is rewriting the rules.

Source: Investment World