Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda launches Wabi, a multiplayer AI assistant with shared threads

The launch comes 12 years after Kuyda stood on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt and presented IO, a conversational chatbot from her startup Luka that acted as a lifestyle concierge for booking restaurants and vacations. IO predated 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.” Luka later became Replika, the AI chatbot companion company. Kuyda left Replika as CEO last year and founded Wabi.

Wabi functions as a messenger app. Within each thread, users can build and use custom apps, such as a weight-loss tracker in a health thread or an app showing nearby children’s events in a family thread. The launch is a pivot, though Kuyda describes it as an evolution. When TechCrunch covered Wabi’s initial launch last year and its $20 million pre-seed round, it was described as a social platform where users could create mini apps with prompts and share them with friends or across the app. Kuyda said the team realized people love personal software rather than “one size fits all solutions in the App Store,” but “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. When a user connects email, Wabi automatically spins up threads and apps to start with, and users can add custom apps or start new threads. Kuyda said Wabi does what other personal AI assistants such as Instinct and Muse do, but also has apps, which helps users do more. She is betting on Wabi’s multi-threaded, multiplayer design. Single-thread experiences get worse over time because too much context piles up in one endless conversation, she said. Interviews with AI researchers show that the longer an AI chatbot conversation goes on, the more likely it is to hallucinate, lose track of context, or respond in ways that would otherwise be blocked by safety guardrails.

Threads can be shared and function as group chats. Kuyda said current agentic apps are just conversations between a user and an agent, and she wants to bring people together in group chats. In one shared thread with her boyfriend, apps include a live music tracker, a daily relationship question, restaurant suggestions, shared calendar events, and a list of books they are reading with suggestions for what to read next. In a family thread, apps track her daughter’s schedule, find kid-friendly events nearby, and quiz 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. Kuyda said her partner can ask Wabi in the chat, “Is Eugenia free next Thursday?” or “Did she buy those tickets?” Access is scoped to individual chats, and everyone in a chat can see when someone’s personal information is requested. Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, meaning its data security controls have been independently audited, according to Kuyda. Wabi runs entirely in the cloud, and most user data is stored in the U.S., she said.

Kuyda said Replika worked on AI that makes people feel less lonely, and that is in Wabi to a degree. She said AI can bring people together, including by helping them spend time better in real life, whether going to a concert together or finding the next book to read together. Wabi is free for now, and the company has not settled on a business model, Kuyda said.