Twelve years after pitching an early conversational chatbot at TechCrunch Disrupt, Eugenia Kuyda has officially launched Wabi, a multiplayer personal AI assistant that she says represents her original vision finally enabled by modern technology. Kuyda, who left her role as CEO of Replika last year, unveiled the new platform on Monday after raising $20 million in a pre-seed round. The launch positions Wabi to compete with emerging personal AI assistants like Muse and Instinct in a crowded market of tools promising to manage everything from inboxes to travel booking.
Wabi functions as a messenger app that allows users to maintain multiple agentic threads dedicated to different tasks and long-term goals. Inside each thread, users can build and deploy custom apps, such as a weight-loss tracker within a health thread or an app displaying nearby children's events inside a family thread. The platform automatically spins up numerous threads and apps the moment users connect it to their email. Threads can also be shared as group chats, with users able to share as much or as little personal information as they choose, from email and calendar data to bank account details. Access is scoped to individual chats, and everyone in a conversation can see when someone's personal information is requested.
According to Kuyda in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, the team realized over the past year that while people prefer personal software to "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 rather than requiring users to create them manually. Kuyda told the outlet that "single thread experiences, if you think about it, get worse over time because it's just so much context in one endless conversation." She also emphasized that today's agentic apps are merely conversations between a user and the agent, and she believes it should involve bringing people together in group chats rather than individuals working separately with their own AI.
Wabi's multithreaded, multiplayer design addresses a documented weakness in AI chatbot technology: interviews with AI researchers indicate that the longer a chatbot conversation continues, the more likely it is to hallucinate, lose track of context, or respond in ways that would otherwise be blocked by safety guardrails. By splitting conversations into distinct threads rather than maintaining a single endless chat, Wabi aims to preserve context and reduce information overload. The shared thread feature represents a bet that AI assistants should facilitate human connection rather than replace it. Kuyda demonstrated a shared thread with her boyfriend that includes apps for tracking live music, asking daily relationship questions, maintaining restaurant suggestions, displaying important shared calendar events, and listing books they're reading together with recommendations for what to read next. Her family-focused thread includes an app tracking her daughter's schedule, another for finding kid-friendly events nearby, and one that quizzes her daughter on Japanese.
The platform is currently free, with the company yet to settle on a business model. Kuyda said Wabi is in talks to raise additional funding. On privacy, Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, meaning its data security controls have been independently audited, and the service runs entirely in the cloud with most user data stored in the United States. Kuyda noted that her previous company Replika worked on AI to make people feel less lonely, and "to a degree, that is [in Wabi] as well," emphasizing that AI can bring people together by helping them spend time better together in real life. The collaborative design stands as Wabi's primary differentiator in a market where most personal AI assistants remain strictly individual tools, though whether users will embrace shared AI threads over private ones remains an open question that could reshape expectations for how artificial intelligence fits into daily social dynamics.