Plaud, the wearable AI device maker, has opened its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore and committed at least SGD $20 million to expand engineering, product development and regional operations. The figure doubles the SGD $10 million investment the company announced earlier this year. The 15,000 sq ft office at Marina Bay Financial Centre was officially opened at a ceremony attended by guest-of-honour Rahayu Mahzam, Minister of State for Digital Development and Information, alongside officials from the Economic Development Board (EDB) and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA).

“Singapore is where we’re building the future of Plaud in Asia,” said Nathan Xu, CEO and co-founder of Plaud. “Every era of computing has its defining interface. In the era of agentic AI, it will be conversation, not screens. Asia is one of the hardest places in the world to build AI that understands context and intent because people switch seamlessly between languages, dialects and contexts. Singapore brings that diversity together in one place. If we can make AI feel natural here, we can make it feel natural anywhere in the world.”

Tenfold growth in nine months

The expansion follows rapid local hiring. Plaud’s Singapore team has grown from 10 to around 100 employees in nine months, reaching its original end-of-2026 hiring target three months early. The office will serve as the company’s base across 12 markets outside Japan and mainland China, including Australia, Hong Kong SAR, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

That pace mirrors the company’s broader trajectory. Since launching in 2023, Plaud has grown from US$1 million to US$100 million in annual recurring revenue within two years and now serves more than 2.5 million users globally.

Why Singapore, and why now

Plaud is positioning Singapore as more than a regional sales office. The company says the city’s mix of languages, dialects and code-switching, spanning English, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil and colloquial usage often within the same sentence, makes it a harder conversational environment than most markets, and one its engineers are building multilingual, code-switching capabilities against from day one rather than adapting later. The local team is now contributing to the next generation of those capabilities, which will roll out across Plaud’s core product globally.

“Singapore’s strong AI and engineering capabilities, diverse talent pool and access to Asia-Pacific markets make it an ideal base for companies like Plaud to build AI products for global markets,” said Lionel Lim, Vice President and Head, Technology Hardware and Equipment, EDB. “The APAC HQ in Singapore will create exciting opportunities for our local workforce to help drive Plaud’s global ambitions through roles in product and AI hardware development and data infrastructure.”

The new headquarters will continue hiring across engineering, product and business functions. For a company building consumer-facing AI hardware, doubling down on a market known for a dense pool of technical talent, rather than treating Singapore purely as a distribution hub, signals an intent to build product here rather than just sell it.