Eric Jing is on a mission to shift people from just talking with chatbots to using AI as an everyday companion to get work done, all from one platform.
That platform is Genspark Super Agent from Mainfunc, the AI startup he co-founded with Kay Zhu in Palo Alto, California in 2024, and has offices in Singapore and Japan.
“We want our users to talk directly to the business outcome, instead of talking to a chatbot. So that’s quite a different user experience,” Jing said comparing against LLMs, generative AI’s large language models commonly used to write, code or problem-solve.
On Genspark, users prompt the digital agent producing slides or spreadsheets directly, in natural language.
“If the outcome is a slide, you are talking to the slide directly. If the outcome you want is a spreadsheet, you talk to the spreadsheet,” said Jing.
There are more than 80 such homegrown agents on Genspark, delivering services ranging from edited videos and generated images to whole websites, marketing materials and even restaurant reservations.
And now, agents from Genspark and other providers, including Cognition, Glean, Kasisto, n8n and more, will be available for organizations to discover securely with Microsoft’s Agent 365, introduced today at Ignite.
“We want to make Genspark … a part of the Microsoft ecosystem,” said Jing of the move to be a partner in Agent 365. “So a knowledge worker can get tasks done not just from the Genspark site, but also within the Microsoft 365 platform without leaving it.”
Firms worldwide are already deploying thousands of agents to automate routine tasks, according to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index report. In an IDC Info Snapshot, sponsored by Microsoft, analyst firm IDC predicts that number will rise to more than 1.3 billion by 2028.
Keeping track of these agents — who created them, what they can access and if they’re behaving safely — is crucial. Unmanaged agents can turn into invisible threats that leak data or take unauthorised action, undermining a company’s security, governance and compliance framework.
Agent 365 is the control plane for agents that extends the existing infrastructure firms use for managing people, to agents. It equips agents with access to the same apps and protections, tailored to the agents’ needs, reducing time and effort spent integrating them into business processes.
Agent 365 includes Microsoft’s security and productivity solutions: Defender, Entra and Purview to protect and govern agents. Meanwhile, IT departments can manage agents with Microsoft 365 admin center and allow these agents to collaborate with their human managers not just on Microsoft 365 apps, but other workflows too.
Having these controls in place cannot be an afterthought, said Irina Nechaeva, general manager of identity product marketing at Microsoft. “All of this needs to be happening together with the agentic innovation itself. So not just the agents, but also the right tools to control, monitor, protect and make those agents more effective.”
So what will this process look like for say, a time-strapped marketing executive who needs to produce a multimedia proposal for the board?
They could go to Microsoft Agent 365, pick Genspark’s Super Agent and have that agent added to the team. And because that agent has a built-in Microsoft Entra Agent ID, it can securely connect to resources it needs to complete the job. They would then prompt that agent to research the topic, produce a presentation deck, document, website, video and posters. And the agent can refine or update these materials based on discussions via email, chat or Teams meetings.
At the end of the project, Agent 365 can compare the agent’s logged activities, to see if they align with the firm’s guidelines and policies.
Jing is confident that integrating Genspark’s “unique capabilities” into the Microsoft ecosystem via Agent 365 will create “magic moments” for the user.
Genspark’s AI tool for creating slides, for example, was already designed with Microsoft’s PowerPoint in mind.
“We wrote four iterations of the file exporting feature so you can export a Genspark slide into a perfect PowerPoint file … people already familiar with PowerPoint or with this kind of workflow in their company — they can still stick to PowerPoint,” he explained.
He stressed that the human element in this workflow is still paramount, regardless how well Genspark’s agents perform.
“In our world, we believe that 80% to 90% of the preliminary work can be done by AI. But the last mile – 5% to 10% of work – should still be done by humans manually. You need to verify everything,” he said.
Partnering with Microsoft is a big step for one-year old startup Mainfunc, and multi-agent Genspark, which was just launched in April 2025.
With a team of just 30 people, Jing says Mainfunc wants to focus on doing one thing really well — helping knowledge workers accomplish more.
Jing said Microsoft offers a “great channel to enterprise,” a user segment that Mainfunc has limited ability to service. “And it’s a great marketplace for different software,” he added.
So far, pouring all its effort into deciding which AI model can best solve pain points or tasks for knowledge workers at lowest cost has Mainfunc predicted to earn an annual run rate (ARR) of $50 million, and ranking as one of the world’s fastest-growing AI startups.
Genspark’s agents are powered by a mix of eight LLMs— comprising household names like OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude—giving users a best-for-purpose service curated by Genspark and underpinned by Microsoft Azure.
“This is definitely our secret sauce,” said Jing, an industry veteran who was a founding team member for Microsoft’s search engine Bing.
This laser focus on user solutions, and Jing’s history with Microsoft, also led Mainfunc to adopt Microsoft Azure as a reliable and secure infrastructure for Genspark.
“Basically, I want to … solve the pain point from our users, not solve the pain point of different services,” Jing said. “We trust Azure to host scalable cloud solutions.”
Azure also enables Genspark to interface with multiple AI models, including from OpenAI and Anthropic, via a single platform.
Going by AI startups’ “true north” metrics — measures of survival and growth — cited by Jing, Mainfunc seems on track. In addition to ARR, which estimates future revenue based on current performance, Mainfunc had a paid retention rate of 88% to 92% in Genspark’s first month, indicating customer loyalty.
Jing said its top subscriber markets are Japan, the U.S. and South Korea.
He sees huge growth for the sector, because he believes the AI revolution has penetrated “less than 1% of society” and there is still much improvement to come in the quality of work that AI can deliver.
“Two years from now, I see the entire market will shift more and more from developer communities to the knowledge workers,” he said.
This article was updated on Nov. 19, 2025 to clarify that Mainfunc’s annual run rate is $50 million. An earlier version incorrectly stated the figure as annual recurring revenue.