Sapiens AI

Sapiens AI (legal entity Singapore Sapiens Technology Pte. Ltd., incorporated 2022 as "Kiwi Network Technology" and rebranded) is a Singapore consumer-AI startup led by founder Bruce Yang. It launched Agnes AI in April 2025 — an AI agent combining real-time web search with a personal memory engine — and runs a free omni-modal API gateway plus a consumer app suite (the Agnes app, Agnes Code, and the Pavo creative studio).

Its model line is mostly closed: the Agnes text models run 1.5 Flash → 2.0 Flash → 2.5 Flash → the flagship Agnes 2.5 Pro Alpha, alongside closed image and video models. Only Agnes 2.5 Pro Alpha is independently benchmarked — Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1: 39 (mid-pack, well below the ~58–60 frontier). The genuinely open research is thin: one open-weight model, Agnes-SeaLLM-8B (a Southeast-Asian fine-tune of Qwen3-8B, Apache-2.0), and one arXiv paper, DSPO (an RL method co-authored by the founder).

Caveat on the company's own claims: Agnes is heavily PR-driven, and several headline figures trace only to its own press releases. Independent reporting confirms a $20M raise (no valuation or investors disclosed); the frequently-cited ">$100M valuation," multi-million user counts, and "Singapore's answer to DeepSeek" / "top-10 lab" framing are self-reported and have escalated across releases. Primary sources also undercut the "built from scratch" positioning: Google's own case study says the consumer app relies on Gemini Flash for inference, and the open model's card lists Qwen3-8B-Base as its base. A real applied-AI product with a genuine mid-tier model — not a frontier lab.