Acti puts AI agents directly into your smartphone keyboard
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- Acti launched an agentic keyboard for iOS and Android that performs actions inside apps like email, messaging, and social media, eliminating the need to switch to a separate AI chatbot
- The keyboard is powered by Google's Gemini models, chosen for intelligence, speed, multilingual performance, and cost-efficiency, and runs on a local-first architecture that keeps personal context on-device unless the user explicitly invokes a feature requiring external processing
- Founder and CEO Young Wang, who previously spent a decade at Baidu growing Facemoji Keyboard to over 300 million daily active users, closed a $5.3 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures
- Acti's "Skills" feature lets users program a single keyboard key to trigger multistep tasks, and early-access testers built over 1,000 Skills in less than two weeks ahead of launch
- Users can publish Skills to a public marketplace, with built-in examples including real-time World Cup data and Polymarket links, and the company plans to monetize via subscriptions offering premium models and higher usage limits
- Acti's leadership also includes CTO Mike Sun, the founding technical lead behind Baidu's Yike Album cloud-photo platform (10 million+ daily active users), and CSO Junbo Yang, formerly of HashKey Capital
Why it matters: Acti's local-first privacy design — keeping user context on-device by default — is a direct differentiator from cloud-based AI assistants, and the founder's track record scaling Facemoji to 300 million DAU gives the startup unusual distribution credibility for a keyboard-layer bet. With $5.3 million seed led by BITKRAFT Ventures and a growing public Skills marketplace, Acti is testing whether the keyboard itself, rather than a standalone chatbot app, becomes the dominant consumer surface for AI agents.
