Singapore, Dec. 22, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Agnes AI, a Singapore-based artificial intelligence platform founded by Raffles Institution alumnus Bruce Yang, today announced it has achieved significant technical and commercial milestones since launching in July 2025, including 3 million registered users and proprietary state-of-the-art models. The company is currently fundraising at a valuation exceeding USD 100 million.
The platform’s rapid growth reflects a deliberate strategy to build sovereign AI capabilities anchored in Singapore while serving Southeast Asia and emerging markets globally. Agnes has assembled a world-class research and engineering team from institutions including the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UT Austin — combining academic rigor with commercial innovation.
“Agnes represents a new model for regional AI development,” said Bruce Yang, founder and CEO of Agnes AI. “We’re proving that world-class AI can originate in Singapore, serve the region, and compete on the global stage.”
Technical Advancement and Proprietary Innovation
Agnes has developed a full family of proprietary models ranging from 7B to 30B parameters, including the state-of-the-art Agnes-R1. The 7B model has achieved SOTA performance on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating a 34.1% improvement compared to DeepSeek’s GRPO framework and surpassing previous 14B models by nearly 9% on complex reasoning tasks such as HotpotQA.
The company has published cutting-edge research contributing to multi-agent AI systems, including papers on “Stable and Efficient Policy Optimization for Agentic Search and Reasoning (DSPO)” submitted to ICLR 2025, and “CodeAgents: A Token-Efficient Framework for Codified Multi-Agent Reasoning in LLMs.”
Agnes utilizes sophisticated task orchestration, routing approximately half of user traffic to self-developed models optimized for specific tasks including research, presentation generation, and image/video creation. Through reinforcement learning improvements, the platform delivers strong gains in inference speed, output quality, and token cost efficiency. Agnes is continuously training regional large language models to deepen understanding of local dialects, slang, and cultural contexts across Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Market Penetration and User Growth
Since launching on Product Hunt on July 4, 2025, Agnes has achieved 3 million registered users and 200,000 daily active users, with approximately 50% originating from Southeast Asia. The platform consistently ranks in the Top 10 productivity tools across Google Play stores in the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other regional markets.
The platform integrates Search, Research, AI Slides, AI Design, Group Chat, Filters, and Explore features into a single interface, designed to serve long-tail users — the 99.5% of internet users worldwide who lack access to premium AI services. Agnes supports minority languages commonly used in Southeast Asia that major global LLMs frequently overlook, and offers significantly lower token costs than major LLM providers.
Funding and Commercial Expansion
Agnes is actively fundraising at a valuation exceeding USD 100 million, with a funding round currently underway worth tens of millions of U.S. dollars. The company remains open to additional investors interested in joining the round. Subsequent funding rounds, projected to value the company at USD 300–500 million, are expected to follow. Proceeds will fund training of regional large language models and accelerate commercial expansion into Latin America and the Middle East.
Strategic Positioning
The convergence of factors enabling Agnes reflects Singapore’s unique advantages: geographic positioning, forward-thinking policy support, and a growing AI talent pipeline. Singapore’s NAIS 2.0 strategy explicitly aims to establish the city-state as a global hub for AI innovation and governance. Agnes exemplifies how locally-built, self-reliant AI systems can combine academic research, supportive policy, and commercial ambition.
Unlike many AI platforms relying heavily on overseas open-source models, Agnes built its own model architecture from the ground up, reflecting a deliberate strategy to develop locally controllable AI technology that serves regional needs while maintaining the flexibility and sovereignty critical to long-term growth.
“As global AI development bifurcates into different regional approaches, Agnes stands as proof that sovereign, research-backed AI can be built anywhere, provided there is clarity of vision, access to top talent, and an institutional ecosystem that supports innovation,” Yang stated.
About Agnes AI
Agnes AI is a Singapore-based artificial intelligence platform uniting real-time communication, creative generation, and productivity tools. Founded by a Raffles Institution alumnus and National University of Singapore AI PhD, Agnes AI has grown to over 3 million registered users globally since launching in July 2025, with particular strength in Southeast Asia. The company is dedicated to making collaboration, creativity, and communication seamless through AI-powered features integrated into a single unified experience. The team includes members from top universities including Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, NUS, NTU, and UT Austin.
