Visko raises $10M pre-seed for hour-long 4K AI video model
What's the deal? Visko, a Sunnyvale startup barely a year old, raised $10 million in pre-seed funding and opened public access to Orbis 1.0, a foundation model that generates hour-long 4K video in real time. Llama VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led the round. The company declined to discuss valuation.
Why now? The raise is unusually large for its stage — five to ten times typical pre-seed medians, which range from about $1 million for pre-seed alone to $2 million for combined pre-seed and seed rounds in early 2026. Visko says the money will fund research, grow its 16-person team, and keep developer access open.
What's the endgame? Orbis 1.0 produces 4K footage at 24 frames per second as it runs, and generation can stretch to an hour. Users can change prompts mid-stream without restarting. Visko describes the system as "physics-grounded" with persistent memory, and a July 29 arXiv paper outlines its architecture: a chunk-wise streaming generator paired with a streaming upscaler.
Who's behind it? Founder and chief executive officer Qing Yin earned a Stanford PhD in computational mathematics and mechanics in 2021 and researched at Apple before launching Visko in 2025. Michael I. Jordan, the UC Berkeley professor whose work underpins much of modern machine learning, chairs the advisory board.
"Visko delivers a state-of-the-art architecture that has a meaningful technological lead beyond conventional short-clip video generation," Jordan said in the announcement. Yin added: "We built Orbis to hold together — physically, visually and narratively — for as long as you want to stay inside it."
How it ships: Distribution runs through Reactor, a platform that left stealth in June with $59 million to build infrastructure for real-time AI worlds. Reactor's API lists two Orbis endpoints, one supporting live resolution switching and one stable. The partnership suggests Visko is betting on platform distribution rather than building its own infrastructure.
What could go wrong? The announcement disclosed no named customers, pricing, or usage limits. Rivals are circling: Odyssey-1 pitched a playable world model, Decart's Oasis 3 targets autonomous systems, and World Labs released Marble this year. Each juggles tradeoffs between resolution, speed, duration, and interactivity.
The signal: Visko's bet on duration and consistency sets it apart in a crowded real-time video field, and its outsized pre-seed shows investor appetite for foundation model teams with strong research pedigrees. Whether that translates from technical demo to sustainable revenue remains the open question — one many foundation model companies have yet to answer.
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
