Wabi 2.0: Replika founder's new personal AI agent launches
Original: Replika’s founder built the AI assistant she pitched at Disrupt 12 years ago
Why This Matters
Personal AI assistants are crowding fast; Wabi's threading model offers a structural alternative.
Eugenia Kuyda, who pitched an AI lifestyle assistant at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2014, launched Wabi 2.0 on Oct. 19, 2026—a multiplayer personal AI agent backed by a $20M pre-seed round.
Twelve years after pitching IO, a conversational concierge chatbot, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Eugenia Kuyda has officially launched Wabi 2.0—the product that most closely resembles her original vision. Kuyda left Replika, the AI companion app that grew out of her startup Luka, last year and founded Wabi shortly after.
Wabi functions as a messenger-style app with multiple agentic threads, each dedicated to separate tasks or long-term goals. Connect your email and it automatically generates threads and apps; users can also request custom apps—like a weight-loss tracker inside a health thread. That auto-build behavior marks a clear shift from Wabi's 2025 debut, when users had to manually create mini-apps via prompts.
"The agent decides what apps to build," Kuyda told TechCrunch. She positions Wabi against competitors like Muse and Instinct, arguing that single-thread AI assistants get harder to use over time as context piles up. Wabi's multithreaded design is meant to keep information organized without burying the user. The $20 million pre-seed funding was announced alongside the initial launch in 2025.