Acti Brings AI Agents Directly Into Your Smartphone Keyboard
On June 30, 2026, Singapore-based startup Acti launched its agentic keyboard for Android and iOS, aiming to embed AI tools directly into the apps you already use—email, messaging, social media, and more. Unlike standard keyboards that only suggest words, Acti can take actions on your behalf, eliminating the need to switch between multiple apps for AI assistance.
According to Young Wang, Acti founder and CEO, this solves a fundamental problem: users constantly juggle apps just to get an AI’s help. In an email interview with TechCrunch (due to time zone differences), Wang explained: “Today’s AI agents are fundamentally limited because user context stays fragmented across separate apps. [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. That is the foundation the entire AI-agent era will be built on.”
How Acti Works: Skills, Context, and Gemini AI
Acti (short for “action”) is powered by Google’s Gemini models. Wang chose them for their balance of intelligence, speed, reliability, multilingual performance, and cost efficiency. The keyboard introduces a feature called Skills—custom shortcuts that allow users to program a single key to trigger multi-step tasks, such as translating a message or sharing a meeting link. Users describe what they want in plain language, and Acti builds it; early access testers created over 1,000 Skills in less than two weeks.
Local-First Privacy and Context Awareness
Acti is built around a local-first model, meaning personal context stays on the device by default. 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. This design emphasizes privacy while still enabling context-aware actions like dropping a local restaurant recommendation or sharing a live stock price within a chat.
Business Model and Seed Funding
Acti plans to generate revenue via subscriptions that offer users more advanced AI models, higher daily usage limits, and other premium features. The Skills can be kept private or shared publicly via a Skills marketplace, which could offer additional monetization opportunities in the future.
TechCrunch also learned exclusively that Acti has just closed $5.3 million in seed funding in a round led by BITKRAFT Ventures. Jonathan Huang, Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, commented: “We backed Acti because this team has a real shot at owning the next phase of human-computer interaction.”
Team and Background
Acti’s team includes CTO Mike Sun, the founding technical lead behind Baidu’s cloud-photo platform Yike Album (which scaled to over 10 million daily active users), and CSO Junbo Yang, who joined from HashKey Capital where he led dozens of consumer investments. Founder Young Wang previously spent a decade at Baidu growing its Facemoji Keyboard to over 300 million daily active users. Wang remarked: “When LLMs arrived, I realized something fundamental had changed. Text was no longer just something people typed; it had become a carrier of intent… That made me believe it was time to reinvent one of the most basic and universal products people use every day: the keyboard.”
Acti is currently available for Android and iOS.