Singapore AI Startup Video Rebirth Raises $80M Seed for World Models
Source: Forbes
A Singapore-headquartered AI video startup, Video Rebirth, has closed an $80 million seed round backed by AMD Ventures, Hyundai's ZER01NE, and Qiming Venture Partners — marking one of the largest seed rounds for a Southeast Asian AI company. Founded by former Tencent Distinguished Scientist Dr.
A Singapore-headquartered AI video startup, Video Rebirth, has closed an $80 million seed round backed by AMD Ventures, Hyundai's ZER01NE, and Qiming Venture Partners — marking one of the largest seed rounds for a Southeast Asian AI company. Founded by former Tencent Distinguished Scientist Dr. Wei Liu, the company is betting that video generation is the most viable path toward building a full "world model," an AI system that can simulate and predict how the physical world behaves.
Video Rebirth's first product, a text-to-video model named Bach, debuted at No. 6 on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard — the highest-ranking startup and cheapest per minute among the top 10. Bach can generate multi-shot videos up to 45 seconds from reference images and text prompts, outperforming ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 on duration. The company uses a proprietary technique called multi-step sampling loss that claims a 10x speedup over competitors by training the model to anticipate and correct errors during generation, drastically reducing inference costs. Unlike rivals burning millions daily — OpenAI shut down Sora in March 2026 after burning an estimated $15 million per day — Video Rebirth built Bach on a fraction of that budget using fewer, higher-quality training videos.
The startup is already eyeing a second product, Olympus, a real-time interactive 3D world simulator slated for release by the end of 2026. Olympus generates not just visuals but environmental audio such as footsteps and collisions, positioning it as a competitor to Google's Genie 3 for applications in autonomous driving training, robotics simulation, and gaming. Hyundai's venture arm invested specifically for autonomous driving and physical AI applications, while Korean game developer Actoz Soft joined the round for gaming use cases.
Why it matters for Singapore: Video Rebirth's rapid rise — from founding to top-6 global ranking in under a year — demonstrates that Singapore is becoming a credible home for frontier AI research, not just enterprise adoption. The startup's ability to attract tier-one investors like AMD, Hyundai, and Qiming from a Singapore base suggests the city-state's ecosystem can now support capital-intensive deep-tech AI ventures. For a market that has historically been strong in fintech and SaaS, Video Rebirth represents a shift toward foundational AI model-building — a space typically dominated by Silicon Valley and Beijing.