Are legacy firms ready for AI agents? This SG startup thinks so

When the AI wave crashed into Southeast Asia, it came with lofty promises: tireless digital assistants, automated insight, and human-free workflows. But for many enterprises, reality never quite matched the pitch.

In Singapore, only three out of 10 companies have rolled out AI in critical workflows, according to EY.

That gap between hype and delivery is the opening that Axium Industries wants to fill. Former ByteDance executive Jeremy Ang and Tobias Leong, who was previously an engineering lead at Databricks, are betting that agents can help deliver on that original promise.

Image credit: Made by Tech in Asia with the help of AI

“Multi-agent systems can do a lot more than what a single human team can accomplish. They never sleep. They never eat. You can multiply their workloads by an order of magnitude without a single complaint,” Leong says. “That’s the benefit we want to emphasize.”

The Singapore-based startup is offering agentic AI as a service. It’s now coming out of stealth after raising an undisclosed amount from investors.

Building a platform with AI Agents

Axium’s main product is a platform that can do three things: parse and analyze various data sets, generate business insights, and deploy AI agents. Currently, the startup has seven agents that are ready to use and are meant to work together.

Each agent is pretrained using models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and open-source options. Leong says Axium can also customize agents to run on a client’s preferred large language model.

In a demo to Tech in Asia, Axium showed how its agents could deliver business insights. For instance, an employee could ask for the company’s top five customers by order value.

The platform then generates a bar chart showing the order value of the top five customers, explains where it got the data, and offers sales recommendations.

Behind the scenes, four agents have done the work: one read and analyzed the data scraped from unstructured documents and company files, one verified the findings based on the source documents, another created the visualization, and the last one generated insights based on the data.

“Data integration is the main challenge for the companies that we currently work with. Axium unifies these data pipelines into a single platform before adding its AI systems on top,” Ang says.

Axium Industries CEO Jeremy Ang (left) and CTO Tobias Leong / Photo credit: Axium Industries

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