SINGAPORE, 24 October 2025 — Singapore-based artificial intelligence firm Agnes AI has reached a major milestone, surpassing two million registered users worldwide, with around 150,000 daily active users just three months after its official launch in July.
Nearly half of its users are from Southeast Asia, and the app has consistently ranked among the Top 10 productivity tools on Google Play across the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
Founded by Bruce Yang, Agnes AI positions itself as an all-in-one intelligent assistant, combining search, research, presentation design, and collaboration tools within a single platform. The system enables users to move seamlessly from research to content creation and presentation without switching applications.
The company’s underlying architecture represents a rare example of fully homegrown AI infrastructure. Agnes AI runs on a proprietary, locally controlled technology stack designed and maintained in Singapore, a move aligned with the nation’s ambition to build sovereign AI capabilities and reduce reliance on overseas models.
Yang is joined by co-founders Evan Pu, Professor of Computer Science at Nanyang Technological University (NTU); Xiaofan Li, Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) School of Computing; and Linus Lee, a Singaporean AI researcher and Stanford graduate. Together, they lead a team combining academic rigour with applied engineering expertise.
Unlike many start-ups that adopt open-source models, Agnes AI developed its own system from the ground up. Its flagship Agnes-R1 model, with seven billion parameters, was built specifically for search, research, and presentation workflows. Internal benchmarks show that Agnes-R1 achieves 34% higher performance on average than comparable models in reasoning and retrieval, while maintaining lower computational costs and stable training efficiency.
“Singapore is investing to build AI that we can understand, control, and trust,” said Yang. “Agnes AI reflects that vision, combining a proprietary model, locally operated infrastructure, and a product that delivers measurable results in classrooms and boardrooms. When we can host, inspect, and improve our own AI, we are not just consumers of technology — we are strengthening Singapore’s sovereign AI backbone.”
Looking ahead, Agnes AI plans to train a larger next-generation model in Singapore in partnership with NUS and NTU. The company is also engaging with government agencies, universities, and corporate partners across Southeast Asia to embed its agentic workspace into educational and workplace ecosystems.
By pairing academic research with real-world applications, Agnes AI aims to demonstrate how locally engineered AI systems can achieve both commercial success and strategic value in the region’s fast-evolving digital economy.
