Agnes AI, an advanced AI assistant launched in July 2025, has achieved over 2 million global users, with approximately 150,000 daily active participants. The platform is particularly popular in Southeast Asia, ranking among the Top 10 productivity tools in various countries like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Founded by Bruce Yang, Agnes AI offers a comprehensive suite of features, including search, in-depth research, real-time slide creation, design tools, and collaborative workspaces, allowing seamless transitions from research to presentation. Its operation relies on a fully proprietary and locally controlled technology stack, reflecting Singapore’s commitment to developing a sovereign AI infrastructure.
Bringing together a core Singapore team that blends academic depth with product engineering, Agnes AI is led by founder Bruce Yang alongside Evan Pu, Professor of Computer Science at Nanyang Technological University, Xiaofan Li, Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing and Linus Lee, a Singaporean AI researcher and Stanford graduate, translating new methods into measurable gains in reasoning, retrieval, and real-time generation.
Instead of stitching together open-source models from overseas, Agnes AI built its own architecture from the ground up. The result is Agnes-R1, a seven-billion-parameter model designed for search, research, and presentation workflows. In testing on real commercial tasks, the model has shown faster reasoning, lower computational costs per task, and higher output quality. On standard question-answering benchmarks, the Agnes-R1 7B model outperformed similar systems by 34.1 percent on average and exceeded some earlier 14B models by nearly 9 percent on complex multi-step reasoning, while maintaining stable training and consistent results.
Founder of Agnes AI, Bruce Yang, explains, “Singapore is investing to build AI that we can understand, control, and trust. Agnes AI aligns with that architecture by combining a proprietary model, locally operated infrastructure, and a product that delivers measurable outcomes in classrooms and boardrooms. When you can host, inspect, and improve your own AI, you are not just consuming technology. You are strengthening the country’s sovereign AI backbone.”
Looking ahead, Agnes AI will continue to translate research into products at a rapid pace, pairing its in-house engineering team with academic collaborators so that ideas can move from the lab to everyday use. The company is also preparing to train a larger next-generation model in Singapore in collaboration with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, while engaging with universities, government agencies, and corporates across Southeast Asia, and exploring integrations with regional technology providers to embed its agentic workspace in both educational and workplace ecosystems.
