SINGAPORE – Plaud, the AI start-up behind a credit card-sized notetaker that has more than 2 million users globally, is setting aside $10 million to expand its presence in Singapore as it seeks to strengthen its Asia- Pacific presence.The company plans to increase its headcount here from about 100 to 150 by the end of 2026, positioning the Republic as the base for cloud infrastructure, AI development, human resources, finance, treasury and global legal compliance. Hiring is under way for roles such as AI engineers, AI agent architects, data scientists, backend engineers, and product marketing managers. The Singapore office will account for about a quarter of Plaud’s global workforce of more than 600 employees, who are spread across its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in cities such as Seattle, Shenzhen, Beijing, Tokyo, London and Amsterdam.The company was founded in 2021, when chief executive officer Nathan Xu teamed up with then Shenzhen-based factory owner Charles Liu, who had experience developing smart wearables, to explore opportunities in the sector. Two years later, they launched the Plaud Note, a voice recorder that record calls and meetings, before transcribing and summarising the content using artificial intelligence. The device debuted on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in June 2023, raising more than US$1 million (S$1.29 million) in pre-orders.The device can magnetically attach to the back of a user’s smartphone, allowing conversations, meetings and phone calls to be recorded with a single button press. Audio files are synced to Plaud’s app, where AI models transcribe the recordings and generate summaries, action items and other structured notes. Users can also apply specialised templates that automatically extract relevant information for different scenarios, such as candidate assessments for job recruiters or structured clinical records for healthcare professionals.Today, Plaud has a series of four devices, including a wearable pin with recording capabilities.On the Singapore expansion plans, Xu said: “The region is highly diverse, multilingual and fast-moving, and Singapore gives us access to strong AI, engineering and regional business talent.””As Plaud scales globally, our Singapore team will play a larger role not only in regional operations, but also in product development, AI development and data infrastructure,” he added. Xu said the Asia-Pacific region – which comprises 12 key markets for now, including Australia, South Korea and Hong Kong – has the most growth potential for the company, but the lowest market penetration compared to other countries it operates in, such as the United States and Europe.The Asia-Pacific region is expected to contribute about US$100 million in revenue in 2026, about 20 per cent to 25 per cent of the company’s projected revenue for the year. Xu said that as the Asia-Pacific team is based in Singapore, expanding the office here will help the company get access to the region. He pointed to Singapore’s good universities and academic talent, and its generations of talents in machine learning, AI, software engineering, computer science and data science.“I think it just has this huge talent base that we can tap,” he said. Currently, the Singapore office has teams managing data infrastructure, with data from Asia-Pacific clients stored and processed in Singapore, and business teams overseeing the design of subscription plans and user interfaces. Xu said that the company hopes to hire more engineers with expertise in machine learning, speech recognition and building agentic AI systems for its research and development team in Singapore.Plaud CEO Nathan Xu said that as the Asia-Pacific team is based in Singapore, expanding the office here will help the company get access to the region. ST PHOTO: JASON QUAHPlaud is in the early stages of building the “scaffolding” for an agentic AI system. Such a system can independently carry out multi-step tasks like turning a meeting transcript into a project plan. The company’s vision is for AI agents to help users execute tasks based on insights from conversations, such as automatically booking a meeting room for follow-up discussions.While Plaud is likely to develop some default agents, it also hopes that third-party developers will be able to build customised agents on its platform, like those that can help users learn new languages through pronunciation support.Xu added that he hopes some of the agentic AI features could be ready by end of 2026.