Since launch in July, Agnes AI, a Singapore-born AI platform, has garnered over 3 million registered users worldwide, with daily active users reaching 200,000 — roughly half of them from Southeast Asia. The platform is demonstrating a remarkable growth trajectory and is reshaping the competitive global AI landscape.
Led by a team anchored in Singapore’s research ecosystem and founded by a Raffles Institution alumnus and National University of Singapore (NUS) AI PhD, Agnes has developed a fully proprietary 7B state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, reflecting Singapore’s broader strategy to develop locally grounded AI capabilities. Agnes is currently in the process of closing a funding round worth tens of millions of U.S. dollars, at a valuation exceeding USD 100 million. The proceeds will be used to train a regional large language model (LLM) and accelerate commercial rollout across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Another funding round, projected to value the company at USD 300–500 million, is expected to launch soon, marking a major milestone in Agnes’s growth trajectory.
From RI Boy to AI Entrepreneur: The Singaporean Dream
Global AI development is shifting from purely computing power competition to sovereign capability competition. Agnes’s success is grounded in Singapore’s strong talent pipeline, research culture, and engineering expertise.
Founder Bruce exemplifies this pathway. After attending Raffles Institution, he pursued dual degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, studying under a Turing Award-winning professor and graduating with high honours ahead of schedule. He later worked at Microsoft and LinkedIn, and co-founded a Silicon Valley startup that achieved over millions downloads.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bruce returned to Singapore to pursue a PhD in AI at NUS, a move that laid the foundation for Agnes. There, he rapidly built a local AI team, drawing talent from NUS, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and international institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.
With a local base but global perspective, the team’s mission is clear: “To build AI that originates in Singapore, serves Southeast Asia, and competes on the global stage, while strengthening Singapore’s autonomy in next-generation AI.”
Explosive Growth: 3 Million Users Since Launch in July
Since its Product Hunt launch on 4 July 2025, Agnes has achieved 3 million registered users and 200,000 DAU. Approximately 50% of users are from Southeast Asia, and the app has consistently ranked in the Top 10 productivity tools across Google Play stores in the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other markets.
Agnes is an all-in-one AI assistant, integrating Search, Research, AI Slides, AI Design, and Collaboration features. Its success is not due to stacking multiple tools, but to embedding AI seamlessly into productivity and creative workflows, making AI accessible for everyone.
Users can move from AI research to content and slide creation in one interface, avoiding the friction of switching between apps. After generating slides, Agnes automatically creates a shared workspace, allowing team members to edit, annotate, and refine content collaboratively with AI support.
The platform’s newest features strengthen team collaboration. Group Chat enables real-time, AI-assisted discussions among multiple users, allowing participants to assign tasks, summarize conversations, co-create content, or simply engage in social interactions with friends. Users can invite others to join, making collaboration and casual conversation seamless within one shared space. With a simple tag @Agnes, users can generate AI-powered slides, conduct research, or create images and videos using AI Design, streamlining both work and creative projects. Meanwhile, Filters — an AI-driven creative tool — automatically generates dynamic, trend-inspired visuals and animated effects, allows users to upload their own photos or videos and apply AI-powered effects, transforming them into unique, animated content for sharing or social media.
Proprietary Agnes-R1 Model Delivers SOTA Performance
Powering Agnes’s seamless product experience is its fully proprietary and locally controllable AI technology stack. With Singapore’s unique advantages in geography, policy support, and talent development, Agnes stands out not only as a product company but as a research-driven innovation powerhouse. Supported by top-tier academic talent from NUS and NTU, the Agnes team demonstrates full-stack innovation capabilities from theoretical frameworks to end-to-end system implementation.
Unlike many AI tools that rely heavily on overseas open-source models, Agnes chose to build its own model architecture entirely from the ground up. Its proprietary 7-billion-parameter model, Agnes-R1, has achieved State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance among its peers. The model’s strong token efficiency, reasoning speed, and output quality have been rigorously validated across real-world commercial use cases.
On multiple QA (Question Answering) benchmarks, the Agnes-R1 7B model outperformed comparable systems by 34.1%, and surpassed previous 14B models by nearly 9% on complex multi-hop reasoning tasks such as HotpotQA. These findings are detailed in the team’s paper “Stable and Efficient Policy Optimization for Agentic Search and Reasoning (DSPO)”, which has been submitted to ICLR 2025 and published on arXiv.
Continuous Breakthroughs in Multi-Agent Research
Beyond model innovation, the Agnes team has also made notable progress in multi-agent systems. Its paper, CodeAgents: A Token-Efficient Framework for Codified Multi-Agent Reasoning in LLMs, introduces a code-first prompting framework that enables structured and token-efficient planning in multi-agent environments.
Together, these research milestones reflect Agnes’s unique position as a company bridging academic research and industrial innovation, showcasing Singapore’s growing strength in building homegrown, sovereign AI capabilities.
Building Singapore’s Sovereign AI Capability
Following the success of Agnes-R1, the team is now preparing to train a larger-scale next-generation regional model with NUS and NTU. Strong market growth and a high-caliber team have attracted investor interest. Agnes is experiencing strong growth across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The company is currently fundraising at a valuation exceeding USD 100 million, with funds earmarked for training a regional large language model (LLM) and accelerating commercial rollout. Another round is expected soon, with a projected valuation of USD 300–500 million.
Just as Europe invests in Mistral to develop regional AI independence, Singapore’s NAIS 2.0 strategy aims to establish the country as a global hub for AI innovation and governance. Agnes exemplifies how locally built, self-reliant AI systems can combine research, policy, and industry, contributing to Singapore’s sovereign AI ecosystem.
With next-generation models underway and significant capital backing, this Singapore-born AI rising star could redefine the global AI landscape.
