Temasek and its investment platform Xora Innovation invest in two AI startups | Lianhe Zaobao

Temasek Holdings and its affiliates have recently been actively investing in artificial intelligence (AI) startups. This week, the German company Black Forest Labs completed a Series B financing round of $300 million (approximately SGD 388.62 million), while the Silicon Valley startup Vinci secured $46 million in seed and Series A funding, receiving support from Temasek and its deep-tech investment platform Xora Innovation. Vinci announced on Tuesday (December 2) that it has completed its seed and Series A financing, with the Series A led by Xora Innovation, a subsidiary of Temasek. Other investors include Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, which previously invested in OpenAI. Vinci combines mature physical simulation with AI models to develop a physics-driven AI simulation system. This system can address the most time-consuming simulation processes in semiconductor packaging and hardware design. The system operates without customer data, simulating faster than traditional methods while achieving higher accuracy. Currently, the company's technology has been deployed internally at three leading semiconductor manufacturers, and independent benchmarking by over a dozen top global companies shows that the system's results closely match experimental data. This means that simulation tasks that originally took several days can now be completed in just seconds, significantly reducing computational costs. In July of this year, Temasek noted in its annual report for the fiscal year ending March 2025 that its AI investments include leading companies in the sector, infrastructure, and startups, while also focusing on companies that can benefit from the development and application of AI. Further Reading AI Drives Digital Economy Development in ASEAN, Number of AI Startups in Southeast Asia Exceeds 680 Temasek: Continuing to Invest in the AI Value Chain but Must Be Thoughtful On the other hand, Black Forest Labs announced on Monday (1st) the completion of a $300 million Series B financing, with a valuation of $3.25 billion. Temasek is one of the investors. This round of financing was led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP). In addition to existing investors such as a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, and Creandum increasing their investments, new investors include Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Canva, and Figma Ventures. Including the previously undisclosed Series A financing, the company's total funding exceeds $450 million. Founded just over a year ago, Black Forest Labs focuses on developing text-to-image models. The team's open-source FLUX model is one of the most popular image generation models on the large model website Hugging Face. The company stated that the funds raised will continue to be invested in the research and development of the next generation of "visual intelligence" models that integrate visual perception, generation, memory, and reasoning