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

Based in Singapore on Tuesday Act (short for “action”) launched an agent keyboard for iOS And Androidwhich not only suggests your next word but can also take actions on your behalf, brings AI tools directly into the apps you already use, including email, messaging, social media, and more.

According to Ying Wang, founder and CEO of Acti, this solves a problem for 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 the user’s context is fragmented across separate apps,” Wang told TechCrunch in an email interview (due to the time zone difference). Acti “sits on top of all of that, which is why we can build a contextual layer that really belongs to the user rather than 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. Instead of asking users to open different AI chatbots, Acti shows 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 go to a search engine or other AI app to get that kind of information, then go back to the app where the conversation happened, which takes time.

Under the hood, the Acti is powered by Google’s Gemini models, which Wang said were chosen for their intelligence, speed, reliability, multilingual performance, and cost efficiency. Gemini is also suitable for one of Acti’s key features, called Skills, which act like customizable 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 built around a local-first model, which means users’ personal context stays on their device by default for privacy’s sake. The app does not access or store private messages, conversations, or personal context unless the user expressly requests a feature that requires external processing, the company says.

Wang says he was inspired to work on a new keyboard for the AI ​​era after spending a decade at Beidou, which took its Facemoji keyboard to more than 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 became a carrier of intent. And in many everyday contexts, that intent can now be directly translated into action.”

“It convinced me 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 reinvent such a fundamental surface for the AI ​​age is exciting,” he added.

Acti’s business model is still taking shape, 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 ships with some built-in skills, like “T,” which allows you to translate a message into another language by long-pressing a letter on your keyboard. Another Skill, “C,” will fire off a meeting link.

The company explains that users don’t need to know how to code to create skills. 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 either be private for your own use or shared publicly in the Skills Marketplace, where you can find things 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 shared exclusively 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 has a real shot at owning the next phase of human-computer interaction,” Jonathan Huang, partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, said of 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 has grown to more than 10 million daily active users. Also at Acti is CSO Junbo Yang, who joined from HashKey Capital, where Yang led dozens of consumer investments.