Zhumazhan Balapanov
177 posts

Zhumazhan Balapanov
@ZBalapanov
founding engineer @reactorworld | founder @ Astyk (acquired) | previously - neurips,iaseai



Real-time video editing is here. SANA-Streaming by @NVIDIA is now live on Reactor. Change the style, the scene, the mood of any video as it plays, with no rendering wait. Try it now: sana-streaming.reactor.inc



Can Claude drive a Waymo on @reactorworld? Yes, but not very well!



Please check our SANA-WM, an efficient minute-scale world model with hybrid linear attention! 🎉

A Walk In The Park (part II) feat @taiuti 🌎 (00:00) 👋 (01:10) What world models are (03:42) Origin story from text-to-3D to @reactorworld (09:22) Deciding to start the company (11:22) GTA, games, and the path into programming (15:09) Building in stealth and keeping secrets (18:32) Picking investors with independent conviction (21:43) Where world models will grow first (26:08) Why low latency matters (29:34) Becoming CEO and scaling the team (32:23) Final advice

Introducing LongLive 2.0 by @NVIDIA. Real-time text-to-video with full multi-shot control. Build your story shot by shot, scene by scene. Available now on Reactor.

I'm excited to announce that the Morpheus AI team is joining Roblox! Over the past two years, I’ve focused on developing the foundational architectures behind modern video world models, including Self Forcing and AR-DiT. This work unlocked something unprecedented: the ability to move beyond offline, pre-rendered AI video generation and instead simulate interactive worlds in real time. Realizing the massive potential of this technology is what drove me to found Morpheus in August 2025. In the months since, our incredible team has pushed those boundaries further than we ever thought possible. We've always believed video world models will reshape how games are created. Roblox Reality is an ambitious bet on that exact future, and it lines up perfectly with what we set out to do: bridging the gap between deterministic game engines and generative world models. Joining Roblox means our technology will help power experiences that reach millions of players every day. To our team, to @a16z and other investors, and to the advisors, partners, and supporters who believed in this from the very beginning — thank you. We're just getting started. Excited to build this at scale.


Today Reactor is coming out of stealth. We’ve raised $59M in Seed and Series A funding, led by @lightspeedvp, with participation from @AmplifyPartners, @wndrco, @Sky9Capital, and @FPVventures. Reactor is the platform for building in the World Model era: the infrastructure that lets developers build with them at global scale for the first time. Stream from a frontier World Model to your app, in real time, all in under 10 lines of code. World Models represent the next major shift in AI: pixels, audio and actions are generated on the fly, in real-time, in response to user inputs, and to the environment. Every time computing has made a shift from passive to interactive, entire industries appeared that didn't exist before. We're standing in front of such moment again. Over the last 6 months, we’ve assembled an all-star team with alumni from Apple, Meta, Google, Luma AI, Netflix, and Replicate. We're already partnering with some of the biggest names and labs in the world, and hundreds of developers are already building on Reactor. The World Model era starts now.

Today, we’re coming out of stealth with $59M in seed and Series A funding, led by Lightspeed, with Amplify Partners, WndrCo, Sky9, FPV, and incredible angels. For a long time, pixels have been pre-rendered and played back passively. World Models change that entirely: pixels are generated on the fly, in real time, in response to what you're doing. Every time computing has made a shift from passive to interactive, entire industries appeared that didn't exist before. We're standing in front of such moment again. Reactor is the platform for building in the World Model era: the infrastructure that lets any developer build with World Models at global scale. With only a few lines of code, and you're streaming pixels from a frontier World Model into your product, in real time, at massively. Over the last 6 months, we’ve assembled an all-star team from Apple, Meta, Google, Luma AI, Netflix, and Replicate. We're already partnering with some of the biggest companies in the world, and hundreds of developers are already building on Reactor today.

Today Reactor is coming out of stealth. We’ve raised $59M in Seed and Series A funding, led by @lightspeedvp, with participation from @AmplifyPartners, @wndrco, @Sky9Capital, and @FPVventures. Reactor is the platform for building in the World Model era: the infrastructure that lets developers build with them at global scale for the first time. Stream from a frontier World Model to your app, in real time, all in under 10 lines of code. World Models represent the next major shift in AI: pixels, audio and actions are generated on the fly, in real-time, in response to user inputs, and to the environment. Every time computing has made a shift from passive to interactive, entire industries appeared that didn't exist before. We're standing in front of such moment again. Over the last 6 months, we’ve assembled an all-star team with alumni from Apple, Meta, Google, Luma AI, Netflix, and Replicate. We're already partnering with some of the biggest names and labs in the world, and hundreds of developers are already building on Reactor. The World Model era starts now.