Singapore's Agnes AI Surpasses 6 Million Users
Singapore-based startup Agnes AI has surpassed 6 million users in seven months, primarily by targeting emerging markets. Founder Bruce Yang attributed the rapid growth to a mobile-first design, rapid product iteration, and strong community engagement. The company's success provides a case study in user acquisition strategies outside of traditional North American and European markets.
- Agnes AI's growth to over 2 million registered users within four months of its July 2025 launch was driven by a user base of which roughly 50% is from Southeast Asia. By January 2026, the platform had reached 5 million users, with 200,000 daily active users and 2.97 million monthly active users. - The company developed its own proprietary 7-billion-parameter model, Agnes-R1, and later an 8-billion-parameter model, rather than relying on existing open-source frameworks. This aligns with Singapore's national strategy for sovereign AI, which emphasizes locally controlled and trusted artificial intelligence infrastructure. - Founder Bruce Yang, a Raffles Institution alumnus and National University of Singapore (NUS) AI PhD candidate, previously worked at Microsoft and LinkedIn and co-founded a Silicon Valley startup that achieved over a million downloads. He returned to Singapore during the COVID-19 pandemic to pursue his PhD and build a local AI team with talent from NUS, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and international institutions like MIT and Stanford. - Agnes AI has open-sourced its 8-billion-parameter model, named Agnes-SeaLLM-8B, which is available on Hugging Face. This model is designed for cross-cultural use, with support for Southeast Asian languages in addition to Chinese and English. - The all-in-one platform integrates features for search, deep research, AI-powered slide and design creation, and collaboration tools, aiming to streamline the workflow from research to presentation without needing to switch between applications. - The company's development was supported by the academic ecosystem in Singapore, with collaborators including Evan Pu, a Professor of Computer Science at Nanyang Technological University, and Xiaofan Li, an Assistant Professor at the NUS School of Computing. The initial launch took place at a National University of Singapore Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP) event.
