Acti, a Singapore-based startup developing the world’s first agentic keyboard, has raised $5.3M in a seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures.
The company is building a keyboard that brings AI directly into any app a user is already working in, without requiring them to switch context or open a separate tool. The funding will support engineering and AI hiring, deeper on-device intelligence, and growth of Acti’s Skill ecosystem and developer community.
Addressing The Market Opportunity
Using AI today means leaving whatever you are doing, opening a separate application, re-explaining the context, and manually carrying the answer back. Every AI assistant currently on the market operates as a destination rather than a presence. Acti’s argument is that the keyboard, the surface where intent begins, has remained unchanged since Apple put it on glass in 2007, and that the technology has now caught up to what the keyboard could actually do.
On-device models can read intent locally, and a single keypress can now complete a multi-step task. The keyboard sits at the intersection of every app a user touches, making it the one interface capable of delivering AI assistance without friction or context switching.
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How The Technology Works
Acti introduces Skill Keys, a system where any key on the keyboard can be programmed to trigger a specific AI-powered action. A long press can translate a message into any language, insert a live stock price into an active text window, or fire off a meeting link, all without leaving the app the user is already in. Skills are built through a plain-language Skill Builder that requires no coding knowledge. Once created, a Skill can remain private or be published to the Skill Hub, where other users can add it to their own keyboard.
Beyond individual Skills, the startup is building a personal context layer that learns from how a user works across apps, the tools they reach for, how they phrase things, and the tasks they repeat. This context stays on the user’s device and under their control, with the intention of making it available, with permission, to any app or AI agent that could use it to deliver more personalized assistance.
Growth And Market Traction
Early access users created more than 1,000 Skills in under two weeks, an early signal of the community-driven flywheel the company is building around its Skill Hub.
Acti was founded by Young Wang, who spent nearly a decade at Baidu International helping grow Facemoji Keyboard to over 300 million daily active users, a product later ranked ninth on a16z’s list of the Top 50 Gen AI mobile apps. CTO Mike Sun was the founding technical lead behind Yike Album, Baidu’s cloud-photo platform, which scaled to more than 10 million daily active users. CSO Junbo Yang joins from HashKey Capital, where he led more than 30 consumer sector investments.
Expansion Plans
The seed funding will be directed toward engineering and AI hiring, continued development of the on-device intelligence capabilities, and growth of its Skill ecosystem and developer community as the platform moves beyond early access.
Looking Ahead
Young Wang, CEO and founder of Acti, explained the structural problem the platform is designed to solve: “Today’s AI agents are fundamentally limited because user context stays fragmented across separate apps. The firm sits across all of them, which is why we can build a context layer that genuinely belongs to the user instead of the platform. That is the foundation the entire AI-agent era will be built on.”
Jonathan Huang, Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, described the investment rationale: “We backed Acti because this team has a real shot at owning the next phase of human-computer interaction. The company is driving an architectural shift in how people use AI. They’re reinventing the one interface every app depends on and turning it into the layer every AI agent will need. That kind of category-defining bet only works with the right founders, and this is the team to make it happen.”
About Acti
Acti is the world’s first agentic keyboard, headquartered in Singapore. The company transforms the keyboard into an intelligent, cross-app execution layer, allowing users to trigger AI-powered workflows and build custom Skills directly from the surface they already use across every app. Long-term, Acti is building a secure, user-owned, on-device context layer designed to serve as foundational infrastructure for the next generation of AI agents. Acti is backed by BITKRAFT Ventures.
