Agnes AI Surpasses 5M Users: How Singapore’s AI Platform Is Building for the 99.5%

Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing AI platform reaches new milestone with proprietary language model designed for emerging markets

Singapore has become an unexpected powerhouse in the global AI race. While most attention goes to Silicon Valley’s established giants and China’s deep-pocketed newcomers, a Singapore-based startup called Agnes AI is quietly building something different: artificial intelligence explicitly designed for the billions of users the industry has largely ignored.

Since launching in July 2025, Agnes AI has attracted over 5 million registered users and 200,000 daily active users — a feat that speaks to a fundamental insight: most AI products are built for the wealthy minority, not the majority of the world’s internet users.

“The users Agnes wants to serve are what we call long-tail users,” explains Bruce Yang, founder and CEO of Agnes AI. “This long tail is enormous  —  it represents 99.5% of internet users worldwide. Many of them don’t own a PC or an iOS device; most are on Android. Their experience with AI is often very surface-level, and many have never used any paid AI features. Agnes’s mission is to bring this group into the AI world for the first time.”

From Regional Tool to Global Contender

Agnes started as a productivity platform — a smarter way to search, research, and create content. But as millions of users began engaging with it in ways the team hadn’t anticipated, Yang realized the company was building something far more ambitious: a social AI network where people don’t just consume AI outputs individually, but collaborate with each other through AI assistance.

The platform integrates Search, Research, AI Slides, AI Design, Group Chat (CoVibe), Filters, and Explore into a single unified interface. There are no separate apps to download, no context-switching between tools. A user can move from research to slide creation to collaborative refinement without friction — a friction-free experience that generic AI tools struggle to deliver.

Within two months of launch, Agnes had reached 3 million registered users. By December 2025, according to third-party analytics, the platform hit 2.97 million monthly active users, ranking third globally in growth rate. Today, it has surpassed 5 million registered users, with approximately 50% originating from Southeast Asia.

The platform consistently ranks among the Top 10 productivity apps across Google Play stores in the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia — markets with populations exceeding 100 million people, most of whom had never accessed premium AI services before.

Building for the Billion-User Problem

The conventional wisdom in AI is that the real money lies in serving enterprise customers and premium consumers. Agnes took the opposite bet.

The platform supports minority languages commonly used in Southeast Asia — languages that OpenAI, Google, and Meta have largely overlooked. It offers token costs significantly lower than major LLM providers, making advanced AI accessible to the vast majority of users who cannot afford premium services. It’s optimized for Android and mobile-first users, not for desktop professionals with expensive hardware.

“If you look at the end game — 5 to 10 years from now — the best AI product won’t be the one with the fanciest features, but the one with the biggest user base,” Yang said. “Agnes’s North Star metric is Daily Active Users. If DAU goes up, everything else will follow.”

This philosophy echoes the playbooks of early social networks: build scale first, monetize later. But for AI, the insight is even more radical. It’s not just about growth — it’s about serving a market that global tech has left behind.

The Technical Edge: Efficiency Over Scale

Agnes’s technical approach mirrors this philosophy. Rather than competing on parameter count alone, the company built Agnes-SeaLLM-8B, an 8-billion-parameter model that outperforms 20B models across multiple benchmarks through advanced optimization techniques.

The model integrates deep Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with efficient instruction fine-tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to achieve superior performance across Southeast Asian languages, Chinese, and English. Through operator-level optimizations and quantization-aware training, the model achieves state-of-the-art performance among sub-10B models — proving that efficient architecture can surpass raw parameter scaling.

The technical foundation draws from research Agnes’s team has published at top-tier venues. Work on “Stable and Efficient Policy Optimization for Agentic Search and Reasoning (DSPO)” has been submitted to ICLR 2025, while “CodeAgents: A Token-Efficient Framework for Codified Multi-Agent Reasoning in LLMs” demonstrates novel approaches to structured multi-agent planning.

This rare combination — cutting-edge research paired with commercial deployment at scale — distinguishes Agnes from both academic labs and purely commercial AI shops.

A Global Team, Built in Singapore

Agnes assembled its team unconventionally. Founder Bruce Yang graduated from UC Berkeley with dual degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, worked at Microsoft and LinkedIn, then co-founded a startup that achieved millions of downloads. By conventional measures, he’d already won the Silicon Valley game.

Yet in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yang made a choice that defied tech industry logic: he returned to Singapore to pursue a PhD in AI at the National University of Singapore. That decision became the inflection point for Agnes.

The team now includes researchers and engineers from MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UT Austin, working alongside faculty from Singapore’s National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University. This combination — world-class credentials paired with deep commitment to regional development — is increasingly rare.

“We’re proving that sovereign, research-backed AI can be built anywhere, provided there’s clarity of vision, access to top talent, and an institutional ecosystem that supports innovation,” Yang stated.

The company’s growth aligns with Singapore’s NAIS 2.0 strategy, which aims to establish the city-state as a global hub for AI innovation and governance. Unlike many AI platforms that rely heavily on overseas open-source models, Agnes builds its own model architectures from the ground up, developing locally controllable AI technology that can serve regional needs while maintaining the flexibility critical to long-term growth.

From Singapore to the World

Agnes is currently fundraising at a valuation exceeding USD 100 million, with a funding round underway. The company remains open to investors interested in supporting its mission to democratize AI access for underserved markets. Subsequent funding rounds are projected at USD 300–500 million.

The expansion roadmap is ambitious: Indonesia, India, the Middle East (Dubai, Saudi Arabia, UAE), Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, each with localized strategies for regional needs.

What makes this expansion meaningful isn’t just the size of the markets. It’s the recognition that the next billion users of AI will come from places Silicon Valley never built products for. Agnes-SeaLLM-8B — now open-sourced on Hugging Face — represents a signal that sovereign, regionally-grounded AI can compete globally.

“The Singapore AI dream was always aspirational,” Yang reflected. “But with 3 million users in the first two months, proprietary models, and a founder who chose to build at home — it’s starting to look like reality.”

For the 99.5% of internet users still waiting for AI built with them in mind, that reality is just beginning.