Twelve years ago today Eugenia Kuyda took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to unveil IO, a conversational chatbot that acted as a lifestyle concierge, helping users book restaurants, plan vacations and handle other tasks. IO was the first product of her startup Luka and appeared before the deep‑learning breakthroughs that later gave rise to large language models. “It still worked,” Kuyda told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “It was pretty magical, but of course it’s nowhere near what we have today.” Luka eventually pivoted into Replika, the well‑known AI companion company. Last year Kuyda stepped down as Replika’s CEO and founded a new venture called Wabi. The technology has now caught up with the vision she had for Luka, just as a wave of personal AI assistants such as Muse and Instinct promises to manage inboxes, locate flight deals and more.
On Monday Kuyda officially opened Wabi to all users. The platform is a multiplayer personal AI assistant that works like a messenger app, allowing people to maintain multiple agentic threads dedicated to distinct tasks and long‑term goals. Within each thread users can build and use custom apps—for example a weight‑loss tracker in a health thread or an app showing nearby children’s events in a family thread. The launch marks a shift for Wabi, though Kuyda describes it as an evolution rather than a pivot. When TechCrunch first covered Wabi’s debut last year, along with its $20 million pre‑seed round, the service was portrayed as a social platform where users could create mini‑apps with prompts and share them with friends.
Over the past year the team realized that while people prefer personal software to “one size fits all” solutions in the App Store, they may not want to spend much time building it. With Wabi 2.0 the agent decides which apps to create. As soon as a user links their email, the system automatically spins up several threads and apps, and users can request additional custom apps or start new threads. “It’s doing what Instinct and Muse do, but it also has all these apps, which helps users do more stuff,” Kuyda said.
App‑building is not Wabi’s only differentiator. Kuyda is also betting on its multithreaded, multiplayer design. “It’s not just everything in a single thread like with Instinct and Muse, where you get buried in the information that it sends you every day,” she explained. “Single‑thread experiences get worse over time because they accumulate endless context.” As conversations with AI chatbots grow longer, the risk of hallucinations, loss of context and unsafe responses increases, according to AI researchers.
Wabi threads can be shared, functioning as group chats. “Today all the agentic apps are just conversations between you and the agent, and I feel it should be more about bringing people together in a group chat,” Kuyda said. “Not you doing it separately with your AI and I doing it separately with mine… I don’t think anyone has yet cracked multiplayer.” She demonstrated shared threads with her boyfriend that included a live‑music tracker, a daily relationship question, a rotating list of restaurant suggestions, shared calendar events and a reading list with recommendations. In a family‑focused thread she showed an app tracking her daughter’s schedule, another finding kid‑friendly events nearby, and a quiz app for Japanese language practice.
Within any shared chat users can choose how much information to share, from email and calendar details to bank account data. “So my partner can ask Wabi in the chat, ‘Is Eugenia free next Thursday?’ or ‘Did she buy those tickets?’” Kuyda noted, adding that access is scoped to individual chats and that participants can see when personal information is requested. On privacy, Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, meaning its data‑security controls have been independently audited. The service runs entirely in the cloud, with most user data stored in the United States.
“My previous company Replika worked on AI that will make people feel less lonely,” Kuyda said. “To a degree that is also true in Wabi. AI can bring people together, even when it comes to just helping you spend time better together in real life, whether it’s going out to a concert or finding the next book you will read together.” Wabi is free for now, and the company has not yet settled on a business model. Kuyda said the startup is in talks to raise additional funding.