Deep-sea Intelligence, a Harbin Engineering University spin-out, has announced a Series A of over 500 million yuan, unveiled on 13 August. The investor list spans top market funds and state capital: Guanghe Venture, Fortune Capital, GGV, a TotalEnergies-managed fund under Cathay Capital, CICC Investment and China Insurance Investment, with returning backers including Zhengxuan Investment, Yunze Capital, Yunshi Capital and Gaojie Capital. Guangzhou Financial Holdings, Shenzhen Hi-Tech Investment and Kejin Holdings had earlier backed it, and BYD sits among its shareholders.
Founder Ma Yiming was the first Chinese engineer at SMD, the world’s second-largest deep-sea robot supplier, now part of CRRC, and led world-first commercial deep-sea mining robots and China’s first heavy-duty seabed operation robot. Since starting operations in 2023, Deep-sea Intelligence has built two product lines, light suspended underwater robots and heavy-duty seabed operation robots, including the 6,000-metre work-class Singularity, the Phoenix cable-burying robot, the Taurus Asia-largest-power cable layer, the Auriga heavy-load seabed robot, and inspection and cleaning robots named after constellations. In May 2026 it released SEAgent, the world’s first deep-sea robot task-decision large model.
In under three years the company has covered almost all seabed operation robot supply in China’s offshore wind sector over the past one to two years and become the first Chinese firm to commercially export deep-sea robots, breaking a Western monopoly. In 2025 it won a near 10 million dollar order from a UAE telecom-group subsea contractor and later a 130 million yuan order for the Phoenix 600 3,000-metre-class robot. Investment data shows new robot sales contracts of several hundred million yuan as of July, with several hundred million more locked for the next two months and about 1 billion yuan of potential orders under discussion. Its DeepMatrix plan aims for the world’s first fully autonomous seabed robot cluster. The global tethered-ROV market was about 2.132 billion dollars in 2025 and is seen reaching 3.143 billion dollars by 2032.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek Robot report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.