Replika founder Kuyda launches Wabi AI assistant — SkimNews
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- Wabi officially launched for all users on Monday as a multiplayer personal AI messenger app, organizing tasks across multiple agentic threads with custom apps built inside each one, such as a weight-loss tracker in a health thread.
- Wabi's agent automatically spins up threads and apps the moment a user connects their email, and the company said the previous social-platform version evolved after data showed users don't want to spend time building apps themselves.
- Eugenia Kuyda, who founded Replika's predecessor Luka and pitched its original chatbot IO at TechCrunch Disrupt 12 years ago, left as Replika CEO last year to launch Wabi, which had previously raised a $20 million pre-seed round.
- Shared threads function as group chats where every participant can see when someone's personal information is requested, and Kuyda said Wabi differentiates from single-thread rivals Instinct and Muse, which she argued get worse over time as context piles up and hallucination risk grows.
- Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, runs entirely in the cloud with most user data stored in the U.S., is free for now, and the company has not yet settled on a business model while it is in talks to raise additional funding.
Why it matters: With Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda now competing against Instinct and Muse, Wabi's bet on multithreaded, shareable group-chat threads targets a flaw the source attributes to single-thread AI assistants: longer conversations raise hallucination risk and safety-guardrail failures. But with no business model settled and additional fundraising underway, the company's path to revenue remains undefined.
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