Analysis
Eugenia Kuyda, who left Replika as its CEO last year, has launched Wabi to all users -- a multiplayer AI assistant built as a messenger app where people can run several agent-driven chat threads at once and build custom mini-apps inside them, according to TechCrunch. The company describes the release as "Wabi 2.0," an evolution of a version that launched in 2025 as more of a social platform for creating mini apps; Kuyda calls it an evolution rather than the pivot the article frames it as.
Wabi raised a $20 million pre-seed round when it first launched in 2025, and Kuyda said the company is in talks to raise more, though she has not named investors for either round. The product is free for now with no settled business model.
An old pitch, new technology
Twelve years ago at TechCrunch Disrupt, Kuyda presented IO, a conversational chatbot built by her earlier startup Luka that acted as a lifestyle concierge -- booking restaurants and vacations -- years before the deep-learning breakthroughs that power today's large language models. She has said the 2014 version "still worked" and was "pretty magical," but the underlying models weren't capable enough to generalize the idea into a sustainable product. Wabi is, in effect, a bet that the technology has finally caught up to a vision Kuyda has been circling for over a decade.
Launching into a companion-AI category under scrutiny
Wabi arrives as the broader personal-AI-agent category faces new trust problems: Meta's Muse agent recently shared a user's home address with a stranger without his knowledge, under overly broad permissions he hadn't realized he'd granted, and Replika itself -- the company Kuyda built and left -- operates in a companion-AI space that has seen Character.AI file for bankruptcy this year. Wabi's pitch includes SOC 2 compliance and storing most user data in the U.S., positioning it against looser permission models competitors have been criticized for. Instinct, another personal AI assistant, is named as a direct competitor in the same space.
What's unresolved is monetization: Wabi has no subscription tier, no ads, and no disclosed plan for revenue, leaving the $20 million already raised -- and whatever Kuyda raises next -- as a bet on user growth translating into a business model later, not now.