A new startup wants to bring artificial intelligence to the software you use the most: your smartphone keyboard.
On Tuesday, based in Singapore Acti (short for “action”) released an agentic keyboard for iOS and Androidthat doesn’t just suggest your next word, but can also take action on your behalf, bringing AI tools right into the apps you already use, including email, messaging, social media, and more.
According to Young Wang, founder and CEO of Acti, this solves a problem familiar to anyone who deals with multiple applications. Users have to constantly switch between different apps just to get the help of an AI.
“Today’s AI agents are fundamentally limited because the user interface remains fragmented across separate applications,” Wang told TechCrunch in an email interview (due to time zone differences). Acti “is in everything, so we can create a layer of context that really belongs to the user instead of the platform,” he said. “This is the foundation upon which the entire era of AI agents will be built.”
The launch reflects a different idea of how consumers will eventually embrace artificial intelligence. Instead of asking users to open various AI chatbots, Acti shows how AI can be integrated into the interfaces we already use.
For example, if a friend wanted to know where to eat nearby, Acti could send a local recommendation. Or if someone mentioned a stock in your chat, Acti could be used to share the live price there in the chat. Today, you’d have to go to a search engine or other AI app to get that kind of information, and then go back to the app where the conversation took place, which takes time.
Under the hood, Acti is powered by Google’s Gemini models, which Wang said were chosen for their balance of intelligence, speed, reliability, multilingual performance and cost-effectiveness. Gemini is also suitable for one of Acti’s core features, Skills, which work like custom shortcuts: Users can program a single key on their keyboard to automatically trigger a multi-step task — for example, translating a message or instantly sharing a meeting link (see examples below).
Importantly, Acti is based on a local model, meaning users’ personal environment remains on their device by default for privacy reasons. The company says the app does not access or store private messages, conversations or personal context unless the user specifically invokes a function that requires external processing.
Wang says he was encouraged to work on a new keyboard for the AI age after previously spending a decade at Baidu, growing the Facemoji keyboard to over 300 million daily active users.
“When the LLMs arrived, I realized that something fundamental had changed,” Wang said. “Text was no longer just something people typed; it had become a carrier of intent. And in many everyday contexts, that intent can now be translated directly into action.”
“This led me to believe that it was time to reinvent one of the most basic and universal products that people use every day: the keyboard. For me, the opportunity to rebuild such a fundamental surface for the age of artificial intelligence is deeply exciting,” he added.
Acti’s business model is still being formed, but the company plans to generate revenue through subscriptions that offer users more advanced AI models, higher daily usage limits, and other premium features.
The app already has some built-in skills, like “T,” which lets you translate a message into another language by long-pressing the letter on your keyboard. Another Skill, “C”, will activate an encounter link.
Users don’t need to know how to code to create a Skill, the company points out. Instead, you just describe what you want in plain language and Acti builds it. Before launch, early access testers created over 1,000 Skills in less than two weeks.
These skills can either be private for your own use or you can share them publicly in a Skills market where you can find ones that people have already created, such as Skills to access real-time World Cup data or Polymarket links, among others. In the future, this Skill Hub could also offer additional monetization opportunities.
The company also exclusively shared with TechCrunch that it just closed on $5.3 million in seed funding, in a round led by BITKRAFT Ventures.
“We backed Acti because this team really has the potential to take the next phase of human-computer interaction,” said Jonathan Huang, partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, about the company’s investment.
The Acti team also includes CTO Mike Sun, who was the founding technical lead behind Yike Album, Baidu’s cloud-photo platform, which has scaled to over 10 million daily active users. Also at Acti is CSO Junbo Yang, who joined from HashKey Capital, where Yang led dozens of consumer investments.
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