Riding the momentum of becoming a nationwide AI product in Singapore with over 200,000 daily active users, Agnes AI today announced the official launch of Agnes-SeaLLM-8B, a state-of-the-art 8-billion-parameter model designed specifically for cross-cultural alignment across Southeast Asian languages, Chinese, and English. The model is now publicly available on Hugging Face.
Agnes-SeaLLM-8B represents a significant technical achievement: through advanced optimization techniques, the 8B-parameter model outperforms 20B models across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that efficient architecture and regional focus can surpass raw parameter scaling pursued by global competitors.
"Most large language models treat Southeast Asia as an afterthought — training primarily on English and Chinese data, then hoping for acceptable performance on regional languages," said Bruce Yang, founder and CEO of Agnes AI. "We took the opposite approach: building a model from the ground up to understand the linguistic and cultural nuances of Southeast Asian users."
Technical Architecture: Efficiency Meets Performance
Agnes-SeaLLM-8B integrates several cutting-edge techniques:
- DSPO Framework: The model leverages Agnes's proprietary Dynamic Sequential Policy Optimization (DSPO) — an enhanced version of GRPO that achieves superior performance on reasoning benchmarks. Based on results from the research team, Agnes has achieved strong performance on open benchmarks, particularly in reasoning, where it outperforms earlier versions of DeepSeek.
- Deep Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Reasoning: Enables complex multi-step problem-solving and logical inference, critical for applications like research assistance and content generation.
- Efficient Instruction Fine-Tuning (SFT): Task-specific optimization allows the model to excel across diverse use cases — from generating presentation slides to answering nuanced cultural questions.
- Direct Preference Optimization (DPO): Achieves cross-cultural alignment by learning from human preferences across Southeast Asian languages, Chinese, and English, ensuring outputs respect regional cultural contexts.
- Engineering Optimization: Operator-level optimizations combined with quantization-aware training allow the 8B-parameter model to reach SOTA performance among sub-10B models and outperform 20B models on multiple benchmarks.
This technical approach reflects Agnes's broader philosophy: rather than competing on parameter count alone, focus on architectural efficiency, regional relevance, and real-world performance.
Research Foundation and Institutional Collaboration
The development of Agnes-SeaLLM-8B builds on multiple research works accepted at top-tier conferences. The team's paper on "Stable and Efficient Policy Optimization for Agentic Search and Reasoning (DSPO)" has been submitted to ICLR 2025, while their work on "CodeAgents: A Token-Efficient Framework for Codified Multi-Agent Reasoning in LLMs" demonstrates novel approaches to structured multi-agent planning.
Agnes is actively collaborating with relevant Singapore institutions to advance large-scale cluster training, aligning with Singapore's NAIS 2.0 strategy to establish the city-state as a global AI hub. The team includes researchers and engineers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UT Austin.
"We're bridging academic research and commercial deployment," Yang explained. "Our team publishes at top conferences while simultaneously shipping models that serve millions of users daily."
Explosive User Growth Validates Regional Focus
Agnes AI has surpassed 5 million registered users and 200,000 daily active users since launching in July 2025. According to third-party analytics data, Agnes reached 2.97 million monthly active users (MAU) in December 2025, ranking third globally in growth rate.
Approximately 50% of users originate from Southeast Asia, where the platform consistently ranks among the Top 10 productivity apps across Google Play stores in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The platform integrates Search, Research, AI Slides, AI Design, Group Chat (CoVibe), Filters, and Explore into a single unified interface designed for mobile-first users.
The user base reflects Agnes's deliberate strategy to serve the 99.5% of internet users worldwide who have never used paid AI features — primarily Android-based, mobile-first users in emerging markets who lack access to premium services.
Open-Sourcing for Ecosystem Growth
By releasing Agnes-SeaLLM-8B on Hugging Face, Agnes aims to accelerate regional AI development and enable researchers, developers, and companies across Southeast Asia to build on state-of-the-art foundations.
"Open-sourcing this model isn't just about transparency — it's about ecosystem building," Yang stated. "If Southeast Asia is going to develop sovereign AI capabilities, we need shared infrastructure and collaborative research. Agnes-SeaLLM-8B is our contribution to that vision."
The model is available under an open license, enabling academic research, commercial applications, and further fine-tuning for specialized use cases.
Global Expansion and Investment
Agnes is actively fundraising at a valuation exceeding USD 100 million, with expansion plans targeting Indonesia, India, the Middle East (Dubai, Saudi Arabia, UAE), Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The company remains open to investors interested in supporting its mission to democratize AI access for underserved markets.
Subsequent funding rounds are projected at USD 300–500 million, with proceeds allocated toward training larger regional models and accelerating commercial rollout.
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 5 million registered users and 200,000 daily active 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. For more information, visit agnes-ai.com.
Media Contact
Victoria Agatha
agnes@sapiens-ai.io
