Agnes AI, a Singapore-born AI-native collaboration platform, has achieved remarkable adoption since its launch in July, surpassing 2 million registered users worldwide. Daily active users (DAU) have reached 150,000, with approximately half of them from Southeast Asia, demonstrating the platform’s growing regional footprint and appeal.
Founded by Bruce Yang, a Raffles Institution alumnus and AI PhD candidate at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Agnes AI brings together research, content creation, design, and collaboration into a single, seamless workspace. The platform enables users to move effortlessly from AI-driven research to slides and content creation, while shared workspaces allow teams to edit, annotate, and refine outputs collaboratively. Early users have praised its speed, ease of use, and ability to enhance productivity.
“Agnes allows teams to focus on creativity and impact rather than switching between multiple apps,” said a beta user. “The speed and quality of complex tasks like slide generation, combined with collaborative tools, have improved our workflow several-fold.” At the heart of Agnes AI is its proprietary 7-billion-parameter model, Agnes-R1, developed entirely in Singapore by a team drawn from NUS, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and international institutions including MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. Agnes-R1 has achieved state-of-the-art performance in real-world commercial applications, outperforming comparable systems on complex multi-hop reasoning benchmarks while maintaining stable and efficient training.
Unlike many AI platforms that rely heavily on overseas open-source models, Agnes has built its architecture from scratch. This local approach allows the team to maintain full control over model development, training, and deployment. The next-generation model will be trained locally using user-generated data, Singaporean AI talent, and strategic GPU partners, reflecting the company’s commitment to building AI that is both locally grounded and globally competitive.
Bruce’s journey exemplifies Singapore’s growing AI talent ecosystem. After graduating early with dual degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, Bruce worked at Microsoft and LinkedIn before co-founding a Silicon Valley startup that achieved millions of downloads. Returning to Singapore during the COVID-19 pandemic to pursue a PhD in AI at NUS, he rapidly assembled a team of top-tier local and international researchers to build Agnes AI.
“Our mission is to build AI that originates in Singapore, serves Southeast Asia, and competes on the global stage,” said Bruce. “We want to show that high-caliber AI solutions can be developed locally, leveraging Singapore’s talent and infrastructure, and deliver tangible value to users worldwide.”
In addition to the Agnes-R1 model, the team has advanced research in multi-agent AI systems, including frameworks for token-efficient collaboration, agentic workspaces for productivity, and theory-driven AI-generated marketing content. These innovations bridge academic research and industrial applications, highlighting the platform’s dual focus on practical productivity and research-driven AI development.
Next Steps: Scaling Locally and Globally
Building on its rapid user growth and research breakthroughs, Agnes AI is preparing to scale its next-generation model with NUS and NTU locally. The company is also completing a multi-million-dollar funding round to support model expansion and international growth.
Agnes AI’s early success positions it as a notable example of Singapore’s emerging AI ecosystem, demonstrating how locally built technology can combine talent, research, and infrastructure to compete globally, while potentially serving as a cornerstone for future Singapore-grown AI capabilities.