Fireside Chat with Charles Wong. From Singapore 🇸🇬 to Silicon Valley: The AI Founder Backed By Top VCs
​A5X: The Ascent Series is a curated lead-up to NUS Enterprise’s flagship A5X: Global Innovation & Venture Summit.
​​This series brings you closer to the leaders who have already mastered the climb, offering the first-hand insights necessary for the challenging road ahead.
Your ascent starts today as we tackle one of deep-tech’s toughest execution challenges...
​What if the biggest bottleneck in AI wasn’t compute — but data?
​Charles Wong, CEO and co-founder of Bifrost AI, reveals how generative 3D is reshaping industries from national defence, aerospace, robotics to space exploration — and what it means for every founder building with AI today.
​Every AI team faces the same brutal reality: you need enormous amounts of high-quality, labelled real-world data to train your models.
​Getting it means deploying fleets of robots, collecting millions of hours of footage, manually labelling everything — then hoping it's enough.
​Charles didn't accept that.
​In 2020, he and his co-founder Aravind Kandiah built Bifrost AI — a platform that generates photorealistic, synthetic 3D worlds at scale, compressing what used to take years of data collection into a matter of hours.
​The same technology is now being used to simulate spacecraft landing on Mars, detect illicit vessels crossing the Atlantic, and train autonomous systems in environments no real-world camera could ever capture.
​This is a talk about what it takes to identify a problem that big, build a solution that ambitious, and attract the world's best investors — all before 30.
​🧠In this fireside chat, you'll discover:
​Building a deep tech startup from zero to Series A
The honest story of going from an SUTD engineering lab to $13.7M raised, Sequoia-backed, and featured in TechCrunch — without taking shortcuts.​How to get the world's best VCs to say yes
Charles has raised from Carbide Ventures, Airbus Ventures, Peak XV's Surge, Wavemaker, and Techstars. He'll share what actually moves the needle in a fundraise.​Singapore to San Francisco — scaling a startup across continents
The realities of building a global company from Southeast Asia, and navigating enterprise sales in the US. Deep-dive and delve into his work on aerospace, robotics, and more.
​Join Charles Wong for an interactive fireside chat as he unpacks his entrepreneurial journey — from bold beginnings to building through challenges and breakthroughs.
​Register with the questions you’ve always wanted to ask, and Charles will answer them LIVE during the session.
​🎯 Why you cannot afford to miss this
​If you’re a:
​🏗️ Founder & Entrepreneurs → Learn how a Singapore founder raised $13.7M, cracked US enterprise sales, and built for national defence markets.
​💼 Corporate Leaders & Innovation Teams → Discover how synthetic data and simulation can unlock new capabilities in robotics, defence, logistics, and enterprise AI — without the cost and constraints of real-world data.
​🔬 Academics, Researchers, Developers, Engineers & Innovators → Understand how synthetic data and generative 3D simulation are transforming AI research and model development.
​Don't just watch AI change the world, understand how it's built.
​From building race cars as a student to leading a Sequoia-backed AI company in Silicon Valley, Charles will take you through his unfiltered entrepreneurial journey — the risks he took, the setbacks he faced, and the convictions that kept him going.
​In this session, you’ll gain real-world insights on thinking globally from day one, navigating deep tech challenges, and building with the resilience, ambition, and clarity required to compete with the best in the world.
Seats are limited. Reserve yours now and come ready to ask questions.
​Event details
​​8 June 2026 (Monday)
​​4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (SGT), Registration starts 3.30 PM.
​i3 building, 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, NUS Enterprise, Singapore 119613
​Seminar Room 3
​Come see what that future looks like before everyone else catches up.
​Secure your seat now
​About Charles Wong
​Charles Wong graduated from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) with a degree in Computer Science, and honed his leadership at MIT. He began his career as an autonomous vehicle engineer at nuTonomy, where he developed large-scale, city-wide mobility simulations.
​He later moved into deep tech investing at Boost VC, gaining exposure to frontier technologies before co-founding Bifrost AI in 2020 with Aravind Kandiah — transforming a university pitch into a venture backed by Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA).
​Today, Bifrost AI’s platform is trusted by leading US government organisations and global enterprises, including the U.S. Air Force, NASA, Anduril, Saronic, Privateer, ST Engineering, NTT Data, and Havoc.
​Charles has spoken at NVIDIA’s ATxSummit, advised Singapore’s Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) on national AI strategy, and has been featured by TechCrunch, Forbes, and NVIDIA.
​At his core, he’s a builder — everything else is a consequence of that.