UTM alumnus and global tech entrepreneur recognized for advancing Southeast Asia's digital economy
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec. 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Ganesh Kumar Bangah, a pioneering entrepreneur and visionary leader often hailed as "Malaysia's Bill Gates," continues to be one of the most influential figures in Southeast Asia's digital economy.
His leadership and impact were recently recognized at the Festival of Ideas (FOI) Putrajaya 2025, where the Minister of Higher Education, Datuk Seri Dr. Zambry Abd Kadir, cited Ganesh as a "prime example of Malaysia's innovation excellence" and a symbol of the nation's evolving knowledge-driven economy. Dr. Zambry highlighted Ganesh's remarkable milestone as the youngest Chief Executive Officer of a Malaysian public-listed company at age 23, noting that his entrepreneurial journey embodies the spirit of innovation and determination that Malaysia seeks to instill in its next generation of technopreneurs.
Championing Malaysian Digital Future and Driving Southeast Asia's E-Commerce Revolution
In 2017, Ganesh founded Commerce.Asia, an integrated e-commerce ecosystem designed to empower small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across Southeast Asia. Today, the platform supports 8.4 million SMEs, 28,000 active sellers, and facilitates over RM7.6 billion in annual sales across seven countries. Under his leadership, Commerce.Asia has evolved into a one-stop enabler for digital entrepreneurship, encompassing omnichannel solutions, logistics, fulfillment, social commerce, and analytics.
Ganesh's vision is simple yet transformative, which is to democratize digital opportunities so that every Malaysian entrepreneur can thrive in the online economy. He also serves as Executive Chairman of Xamble Group Limited (formerly Netccentric), an ASX-listed company that owns Nuffnang, Malaysia's largest influencer platform with a community of over 20,000 creators, redefining the intersection between marketing, technology, and creative industries.
His expertise and influence extend far beyond his enterprises. He is currently a Board Member of the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) and Payments Network Malaysia (PayNet), where he helps shape national strategies for fintech infrastructure and digital transformation. He previously served as Chairman of the National Tech Association of Malaysia (PIKOM) and now advises its national think tank, Future Digital, dedicated to advancing Malaysia's digital leadership and innovation agenda. His national roles reflect a deep commitment to ensuring that Malaysia remains a competitive hub for digital entrepreneurship, data-driven governance, and sustainable technological growth.
In 2023, Ganesh received the World Distinguished Digital Entrepreneur Lifetime Achievement Award from the KSI Strategic Institute for Asia Pacific, honoring his lifelong contributions to technological innovation and leadership across Asia. He was also previously named the Ernst & Young Technology Entrepreneur of the Year (2002), listed among Southeast Asia's Top 30 Tech Founders by Tech in Asia (2016), and recognized as one of Asia's Most Influential People by Society Magazine (2015). These accolades highlight not only his entrepreneurial success but also his enduring influence on Malaysia's digital transformation.
From University Dreamer to NASDAQ Pioneer and Continuing Legacy of Innovation
Ganesh's early fascination with technology sparked a lifelong pursuit of innovation. As a proud alumnus of UTM, his story began as a Telecommunication Engineering student in UTM. He took a bold step, pausing his studies in his third year to build his first startup, MOL AccessPortal, in 2000. By 2014, his company, later known as MOL Global Inc., became the first Southeast Asian internet company to be listed on NASDAQ, cementing his position as one of the region's foremost technology leaders. MOL's success positioned Malaysia on the global tech map, pioneering online payment systems across Asia and connecting millions of users through digital commerce.
His journey from a student entrepreneur to a global tech leader demonstrates how UTM's ecosystem continues to inspire problem-solvers and innovators capable of reshaping industries and uplifting societies. In his reflections, Ganesh often emphasizes that entrepreneurship should serve a higher purpose which is "to create impact beyond profit, to build opportunities that empower people and transform communities."
Ganesh continues to inspire Malaysia's youth to embrace creativity and technology as tools for nation-building. As he shared in his recent public address, "The future of Malaysia will not be built on resources, but on the resilience and ideas of our people." His entrepreneurial odyssey, from a UTM dreamer to a global technology pioneer, stands as a testament to Malaysia's growing stature as a digital innovation powerhouse.
About Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM):
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) is a research-intensive public university specialising in engineering, science, and technology, with a growing international profile in sustainability, innovation, and the humanities. Established in 1904 and located in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur, UTM is dedicated to producing global talents, impactful research, and meaningful partnerships that contribute to a more just and sustainable world.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
Ganesh Kumar Bangah: Malaysia's Bill Gates Leading the Next Digital Renaissance
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Powered by LightX2V inference framework to enable low‑cost, high-throughput video generation
HONG KONG, Dec. 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- SenseTime launched its Seko 2.0, a multi-episode drama generation agent tailored for short drama and motion comic creators. Supporting production up to 100-episode series, Seko 2.0 ensures consistency in characters, scenes, and props across episodes. It significantly boosts production efficiency, reducing comic drama production time by 80% to 90% compared to traditional methods.
Seko 2.0 is powered by SenseTime's open‑source LightX2V framework, the industry's first inference framework capable of real‑time video generation. This innovative framework allows for cost-effective and high-throughput video production.
Supporting 100-episode series generation
First launched in July 2025, Seko attracted over 100,000 creators within two months and its user base surpassed 200,000 in less than half a year, 30% of which were short drama creators and 20% comic drama creators.
The new Seko 2.0 further lowers the creative threshold and enables more efficient video production. Its key upgraded features include:
- A revamped User Interface (UI) with optimized visual presentation, delivering an immersive creative experience.
- Multi-episode generation capability with long-context management, supporting the creation up to 100 episodes.
- Intelligent Agent scheduling, enabling flexible association of characters, scenes, and props across episodes, with character makeup and styling adaptable to different scenarios.
Xu Li, Chairman of the Board and CEO of SenseTime, stated: "Seko will open a door for people, who have creative imagination, but lack of professional production capabilities, so they can truly enter the creative ecosystem and unleash their imagination." He added that, as AI capabilities continue to evolve, the quality of generated episodes will gradually move up, generating both refined "high-brow" works and popular "low-brow" content that can coexist harmoniously.
AI comic and short dramas have experienced an explosive growth in China. Data shows that the supply of comic dramas in mainland China surged at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 83% in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, more than 3,000 works were produced with total revenues jumping by 12 times. Many individual creators and small teams have joined this creative trend, some even taking it as their second career.
Enabling multi-person lip-sync & audio-visual synchronization
Most existing AI video generation products on the market only support single-episode short films or clip production. To meet creators' urgent demand for high-quality, large-scale multi-episode production, Seko 2.0 achieves two core technology breakthroughs:
1) SekoIDX: Achieving character consistency across multi-episode and cross-shot scenarios
Maintaining character consistency across episodes and shots has long been an industry challenge. Traditional generation methods often result in characters appearing as "copied and pasted" (lacking vividness) or "unrecognizable" when responding to new motion or expression promots. By introducing "negative reference images" in the high-noise phase of diffusion models, SekoIDX ensures character consistency across multi-episode and cross-shot content while avoiding excessive similarity to reference images. It also maintains high stability when responding to commands for different expressions, poses, and scenes.
2) SekoTalk: Realizing multi-person lip-sync and natural audio-visual synchronization
Traditional digital human technology often suffers from inaccurate lip-sync in complex scenarios involving multi-language and multi-person interactions. As the industry's first solution supporting lip-sync for more than two people, SekoTalk achieves highly precise audio-visual synchronization from single-person to multi-person interactions through a series of innovative designs, whether for daily conversations, intense arguments, or group counting.
These underlying technology breakthroughs directly translate to a leap in productivity. Under the traditional workflow, a team would typically take over three months to complete 50 episodes. With Seko 2.0, the comic drama production cycle can be reduced by 80% to 90%. Seko's comprehensive features make it feasible for independent creators to produce videos in a "one-person crew" model.
- Explore SekoTalk, built on LightX2V and SenseTime's generation model, enabling multi‑person lip‑sync and natural audio‑visual synchronization for videos: http://sekotalk.com/
Adapting to domestic solutions
Multi-episode creation of AI short dramas and comic dramas involves a large number of shots. A single 5-second video requires generating nearly 100,000 tokens, and 10 to 20 shots can result in a total token demand of 1 to 2 million.
To address this challenge, SenseTime has developed Phased DMD Distillation technology, which can significantly reduce the overall cost of multi-episode generation. By combining phased distillation with a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model, it allows different models to specialize in different stages of the generation process, substantially improving overall model capability and efficiency without increasing inference costs.
SenseTime has also open-sourced LightX2V, the industry's first inference framework enabling real-time video generation. Through optimizations such as DiT distillation acceleration, lightweight VAE, and sparse attention, it achieves low-cost real-time video generation. LightX2V can generate a 5-second video on consumer-grade graphics cards in under 5 seconds, significantly outperforming Sora2, which takes several minutes. To date, it has accumulated over 5.3 million downloads and has gained widespread popularity among creators worldwide.
On domestic chip platforms, Seko can achieve generation effects comparable to international chip platforms in similar timeframes. International chip platforms can generate 1.25 seconds of video per second of operation, while domestic chip platforms generate 1.0625 seconds per second. With domestic chip performance improving and ecosystem maturing, this gap is expected to further narrow down.
In the future, SenseTime will also offer domestic solution options for Seko creators, ushering in a low-cost era of AI video creation with extreme cost-performance ratio.
Topping Douyin's AI short drama chart
In the comic and short drama market, Seko has successfully incubated a series of hit shows, including the live-action short drama "Wan Xin Ji", which topped Douyin's AI Short Drama Chart. Works such as "I Built a Doomsday Fortress on the Mountain Top" and "Yin Shen Lu" have also gained widespread attention.
In the high-quality film and television sector, Seko has officially reached a strategic partnership with Yangtze River Film Group, a leading enterprise in the film and television industry. The two parties will jointly explore the integrated innovation of "Generative AI (AIGC) + Film and Television," planning to launch a series of short dramas based on Jingchu cultural and historical stories next year. The two sides will also co-incubate theatrical-level AIGC films, promoting the integration of AI creative tools into professional film and television production processes.
Powered by LightX2V inference framework to enable low‑cost, high-throughput video generation
HONG KONG, Dec. 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- SenseTime launched its Seko 2.0, a multi-episode drama generation agent tailored for short drama and motion comic creators. Supporting production up to 100-episode series, Seko 2.0 ensures consistency in characters, scenes, and props across episodes. It significantly boosts production efficiency, reducing comic drama production time by 80% to 90% compared to traditional methods.
Seko 2.0 is powered by SenseTime's open‑source LightX2V framework, the industry's first inference framework capable of real‑time video generation. This innovative framework allows for cost-effective and high-throughput video production.
Supporting 100-episode series generation
First launched in July 2025, Seko attracted over 100,000 creators within two months and its user base surpassed 200,000 in less than half a year, 30% of which were short drama creators and 20% comic drama creators.
The new Seko 2.0 further lowers the creative threshold and enables more efficient video production. Its key upgraded features include:
- A revamped User Interface (UI) with optimized visual presentation, delivering an immersive creative experience.
- Multi-episode generation capability with long-context management, supporting the creation up to 100 episodes.
- Intelligent Agent scheduling, enabling flexible association of characters, scenes, and props across episodes, with character makeup and styling adaptable to different scenarios.
Xu Li, Chairman of the Board and CEO of SenseTime, stated: "Seko will open a door for people, who have creative imagination, but lack of professional production capabilities, so they can truly enter the creative ecosystem and unleash their imagination." He added that, as AI capabilities continue to evolve, the quality of generated episodes will gradually move up, generating both refined "high-brow" works and popular "low-brow" content that can coexist harmoniously.
AI comic and short dramas have experienced an explosive growth in China. Data shows that the supply of comic dramas in mainland China surged at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 83% in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, more than 3,000 works were produced with total revenues jumping by 12 times. Many individual creators and small teams have joined this creative trend, some even taking it as their second career.
Enabling multi-person lip-sync & audio-visual synchronization
Most existing AI video generation products on the market only support single-episode short films or clip production. To meet creators' urgent demand for high-quality, large-scale multi-episode production, Seko 2.0 achieves two core technology breakthroughs:
1) SekoIDX: Achieving character consistency across multi-episode and cross-shot scenarios
Maintaining character consistency across episodes and shots has long been an industry challenge. Traditional generation methods often result in characters appearing as "copied and pasted" (lacking vividness) or "unrecognizable" when responding to new motion or expression promots. By introducing "negative reference images" in the high-noise phase of diffusion models, SekoIDX ensures character consistency across multi-episode and cross-shot content while avoiding excessive similarity to reference images. It also maintains high stability when responding to commands for different expressions, poses, and scenes.
2) SekoTalk: Realizing multi-person lip-sync and natural audio-visual synchronization
Traditional digital human technology often suffers from inaccurate lip-sync in complex scenarios involving multi-language and multi-person interactions. As the industry's first solution supporting lip-sync for more than two people, SekoTalk achieves highly precise audio-visual synchronization from single-person to multi-person interactions through a series of innovative designs, whether for daily conversations, intense arguments, or group counting.
These underlying technology breakthroughs directly translate to a leap in productivity. Under the traditional workflow, a team would typically take over three months to complete 50 episodes. With Seko 2.0, the comic drama production cycle can be reduced by 80% to 90%. Seko's comprehensive features make it feasible for independent creators to produce videos in a "one-person crew" model.
- Explore SekoTalk, built on LightX2V and SenseTime's generation model, enabling multi‑person lip‑sync and natural audio‑visual synchronization for videos: http://sekotalk.com/
Adapting to domestic solutions
Multi-episode creation of AI short dramas and comic dramas involves a large number of shots. A single 5-second video requires generating nearly 100,000 tokens, and 10 to 20 shots can result in a total token demand of 1 to 2 million.
To address this challenge, SenseTime has developed Phased DMD Distillation technology, which can significantly reduce the overall cost of multi-episode generation. By combining phased distillation with a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model, it allows different models to specialize in different stages of the generation process, substantially improving overall model capability and efficiency without increasing inference costs.
SenseTime has also open-sourced LightX2V, the industry's first inference framework enabling real-time video generation. Through optimizations such as DiT distillation acceleration, lightweight VAE, and sparse attention, it achieves low-cost real-time video generation. LightX2V can generate a 5-second video on consumer-grade graphics cards in under 5 seconds, significantly outperforming Sora2, which takes several minutes. To date, it has accumulated over 5.3 million downloads and has gained widespread popularity among creators worldwide.
On domestic chip platforms, Seko can achieve generation effects comparable to international chip platforms in similar timeframes. International chip platforms can generate 1.25 seconds of video per second of operation, while domestic chip platforms generate 1.0625 seconds per second. With domestic chip performance improving and ecosystem maturing, this gap is expected to further narrow down.
In the future, SenseTime will also offer domestic solution options for Seko creators, ushering in a low-cost era of AI video creation with extreme cost-performance ratio.
Topping Douyin's AI short drama chart
In the comic and short drama market, Seko has successfully incubated a series of hit shows, including the live-action short drama "Wan Xin Ji", which topped Douyin's AI Short Drama Chart. Works such as "I Built a Doomsday Fortress on the Mountain Top" and "Yin Shen Lu" have also gained widespread attention.
In the high-quality film and television sector, Seko has officially reached a strategic partnership with Yangtze River Film Group, a leading enterprise in the film and television industry. The two parties will jointly explore the integrated innovation of "Generative AI (AIGC) + Film and Television," planning to launch a series of short dramas based on Jingchu cultural and historical stories next year. The two sides will also co-incubate theatrical-level AIGC films, promoting the integration of AI creative tools into professional film and television production processes.
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
SenseTime Launches Seko 2.0 Drama Series Generation Platform
