Twelve years ago today, Eugenia Kuyda stood up on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt and presented a conversational chatbot called IO that acted as a lifestyle concierge to help people book restaurants and vacations along with other tasks. IO, the first product from her startup Luka, came before the deep learning breakthroughs that would eventually lead to today’s large language models. Last year, Kuyda left as CEO of Replika and founded Wabi.
The technology has finally caught up with her original vision for Luka, just in time for Wabi to take on a wave of new personal AI assistants such as Muse and Instinct, that promise to do everything from manage your inbox to find you the best flight deals. On Monday, Kuyda officially launched Wabi for all users, a multiplayer personal AI assistant that functions as a messenger app, allowing users to maintain multiple agentic threads dedicated to different tasks and long-term goals. Within each thread, users can build and use custom apps, like a weight-loss tracker inside a health thread or an app showing nearby children’s events inside a family thread.
The launch is something of a pivot for Wabi, though Kuyda describes it as more of an evolution. When TechCrunch covered Wabi’s initial launch last year, along with its $20 million pre-seed round, it was described as more of a social platform where you could create mini apps with prompts that you could share with friends or across the app. Over the past year, Kuyda said the team realized that while people love personal software rather than “one size fits all solutions in the App Store,” they “maybe don’t want to spend a lot of time, or any time, building it.” With Wabi 2.0, the agent decides what apps to build.
The moment you connect it to your email, it automatically spins up a number of threads and apps to start with, and users can add to that by requesting custom apps or starting new threads. App-building isn’t Wabi’s only differentiator. Kuyda is also betting on its multi-threaded, multiplayer design.
Threads can also be shared, functioning as group chats. In one with her boyfriend, a row of apps along the top helps the two of them connect and find things to do together, including a live music tracker, an app that asks a question every day about their relationship, a running list of restaurant suggestions, important events from their shared calendar, and a list of books they’re reading together with suggestions for what to read next. In her more family-focused thread, there is an app tracking her daughter’s schedule, another for finding kid-friendly events nearby, and another that quizzes her daughter on Japanese.
Within any shared chat, users can share as much or as little as they want, from email and calendar information to bank account details. She noted that access is scoped to individual chats, and everyone in a chat can see when someone’s personal information is requested. On privacy more broadly, Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, meaning its data security controls have been independently audited.
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