Swan Htet Aung

I build AI where no one has built before.

A pattern of firsts
2012 One of Myanmar's first mobile developers
2016 First commercial natural language understanding for Burmese
2021 First to scale conversational AI across Southeast Asian enterprise
2025 EB-1A visa for extraordinary ability in artificial intelligence
The Language

First Commercial Burmese NLU

In 2016, Swan Htet Aung developed the first commercial natural language understanding system for the Burmese language — 54 million speakers, zero training data, no tokenizer, no precedent. A writing system with no spaces between words and no existing NLP infrastructure. Started from nothing.

2016 · Zero to one
The Scale

EXPA.AI

Swan Htet Aung founded EXPA.AI, a conversational AI platform that processed over 100 million conversations for Samsung, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and 1,500+ other businesses across emerging markets in Southeast Asia.

100M+ conversations processed
The Platform

Burmese.AI

Myanmar's leading open-source artificial intelligence initiative, founded by Swan Htet Aung. Building the foundational tools, datasets, and community that make Burmese-language AI possible for everyone.

Open source · Community-driven

In 2025, Swan Htet Aung was granted the EB-1A visa for extraordinary ability in artificial intelligence by the United States government — one of the ways the U.S. identifies people who've moved their field forward.

What I'm focused on now
Exploring sovereign memory architectures for AI agents
Scaling open-source Burmese language AI infrastructure
Building AI products that work in low-resource environments
Last updated February 2026
Essay

Building AI Where the Playbook Doesn't Exist

On what it means to build language technology for 54 million people when no one has built the tools, the data, or the precedent. Why the hardest AI problems aren't in San Francisco.

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