Eugenia Kuyda, who founded Replika, officially launched Wabi for all users on Monday. Wabi is a multiplayer personal AI assistant built as a messenger app. TechCrunch AI reports that the launch comes exactly 12 years after Kuyda went onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt to pitch IO, a chatbot concierge that booked restaurants and vacations. IO was the first product from her startup Luka, which later became Replika.
IO came out before the deep learning breakthroughs behind today’s large language models. “It still worked,” Kuyda told TechCrunch. “It was pretty magical … but, of course, it’s nowhere near what we have today.” Now the technology has caught up with that original idea, and Wabi is entering a crowded field of personal AI assistants that includes Muse and Instinct.
From App Builder to Agent
This launch is a pivot, though Kuyda calls it an evolution. When Wabi first launched last year with a $20 million pre-seed round, it was more of a social platform. You wrote prompts to create mini apps and shared them with friends.
The team learned something useful in the year since. Kuyda says people love personal software more than “one size fits all solutions in the App Store,” but they “maybe don’t want to spend a lot of time, or any time, building it.” So in Wabi 2.0, the agent decides which apps to build for you.
5 Things That Set Wabi Apart
- It builds apps for you. Once you connect your email, Wabi sets up a starter group of threads and apps on its own. You can ask for more custom apps or open new threads whenever you want. “It’s doing what Instinct and Muse do, but it also has all these apps,” Kuyda said.
- Many threads, not one. Instinct and Muse put everything into a single conversation. Wabi splits tasks and long-term goals into separate agentic threads. Kuyda argues that “single thread experiences… get worse over time because it’s just so much context in one endless conversation.” She has a point. AI researchers say long chatbot sessions are more likely to hallucinate, lose context, or slip past safety guardrails.
- Mini apps inside each thread. A health thread can include a weight-loss tracker. A family thread can show kid-friendly events nearby. Kuyda’s own family thread has an app that tracks her daughter’s schedule and one that quizzes her daughter on Japanese.
- Multiplayer by default. You can share threads as group chats. In Kuyda’s thread with her boyfriend, the apps include a live music tracker, a daily relationship question, restaurant suggestions, shared calendar events, and a reading list with recommendations. “I don’t think anyone has yet cracked multiplayer,” she said.
- You control what you share. Each person decides how much of their email, calendar, or even bank details to share in a chat. That lets a partner ask, “Is Eugenia free next Thursday?” Access is limited to each chat, and everyone in the chat can see when someone’s personal information gets requested.
Privacy and Infrastructure
Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, which means an independent auditor has reviewed its data security controls. The service runs entirely in the cloud, and Kuyda says most user data is stored in the U.S.
Still, letting an assistant pull bank details into a group chat is a big ask. Clear permissions help, but many users will need time to get comfortable with that much access. I’d expect this to be the biggest hurdle to adoption.
Availability and Pricing
Wabi is free for now. The company hasn’t picked a business model yet, and Kuyda says it’s in talks to raise more money. So expect changes once it starts charging.
Why It Matters
What stands out here is the bet on social AI. Almost every agentic assistant today is a private conversation between one person and one bot. Kuyda thinks the real opportunity is coordinating between people: couples planning weekends, parents managing schedules, friends picking concerts.
That ties back to her Replika roots. “My previous company Replika worked on AI that will make people feel … less lonely,” she said. With Wabi, the goal is to help people spend more time together in real life instead of more time talking to a bot.
The next test is whether people actually want shared AI threads, and whether Wabi can find a business model before bigger players copy the idea. Full details are in TechCrunch AI’s original report.