Acti puts AI agents directly into your smartphone keyboard

A new startup wants to bring AI to the software you use the most: your smartphone’s keyboard.

On Tuesday, Singapore-based Acti (short for “action”) launched an agentic keyboard for iOS and Android, one that doesn’t just suggest your next word but can also take actions on your behalf, bringing AI tools directly into the apps you already use, including email, messaging, social media, and more.

According to Young Wang, Acti founder and CEO, this solves a problem familiar to anyone juggling multiple apps; users have to constantly switch between different apps just to get an AI’s help.

“Today’s AI agents are fundamentally limited because user context stays fragmented across separate apps,” Wang told TechCrunch in an email interview (due to time zone differences). Acti “sits across all of them, which is why we can build a context layer that genuinely belongs to the user instead of the platform,” he said. “That is the foundation the entire AI-agent era will be built on.”

The launch reflects a different idea about how consumers will ultimately embrace AI. Rather than asking users to open various AI chatbots, Acti showcases how AI can be embedded into the interfaces we already use.

For instance, if a friend wanted to know where to eat nearby, Acti could drop in a local recommendation. Or if someone mentioned a stock in your conversation, Acti could be used to share the live price right there in the chat. Today, you’d have to switch to a search engine or other AI app to get this sort of information, then return to the app where the conversation occurred, 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-efficiency. Gemini is also well-suited for one of Acti’s key features, called Skills, which work like custom shortcuts: Users can program a single key on their keyboard to trigger a multistep task automatically — for instance, translating a message or instantly sharing a meeting link (see examples below).

Importantly, Acti is built around a local-first model, which means users’ personal context stays on their device by default for privacy’s sake. The company says the app does not access or store private messages, conversations, or personal context unless the user explicitly invokes a feature that requires external processing.

Wang says he was encouraged to work on a new keyboard for the AI era after previously spending a decade at Baidu, growing its Facemoji Keyboard to over 300 million daily active users.

“When LLMs arrived, I realized 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 directly translated into action.”

“That made me believe it was time to reinvent one of the most basic and universal products people use every day: the keyboard. For me, the opportunity to rebuild such a foundational surface for the AI era is deeply exciting,” he added.

Acti’s business model is still taking shape, but the company plans to generate revenue via subscriptions that offer users more advanced AI models, higher daily usage limits, and other premium features.

The app ships with some built-in Skills already, like “T,” which allows you to translate a message to another language by long-pressing the letter on your keyboard. Another Skill, “C,” will fire off a meeting link.

Users don’t have to know how to code to create a Skill, the company points out. Instead, you can just describe what you want in plain language, and Acti builds it. Ahead of launch, early access testers built over 1,000 Skills in less than two weeks.

These Skills can be either private for your own use or shared publicly to a Skills marketplace, where you can find those that people already built, like Skills for accessing 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 shared with TechCrunch exclusively that it has just closed on $5.3 million in seed funding, in a round led by BITKRAFT Ventures.

“We backed Acti because this team has a real shot at owning the next phase of human-computer interaction,” said Jonathan Huang, partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, about the firm’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 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.

Topics

acti, agentic app, AI, Apps, Startups, TC

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Sarah Perez

Consumer News Editor

Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.

You can contact or verify outreach from Sarah by emailing sarahp@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at sarahperez.01 on Signal.

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