Replika’s founder built the AI assistant she pitched at Disrupt 12 years ago

Twelve years after she demoed IO on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage, Eugenia Kuyda is back with the thing she says she always wanted to build. IO was Luka’s first product: a conversational bot that could help book restaurants, plan vacations and handle other errands. Back then, the deep learning wave that led to modern large language models hadn’t arrived yet. Kuyda says it still worked. It just wasn’t anywhere near today’s version of the idea.

Luka eventually became Replika, the AI companion company. Kuyda left as Replika’s CEO last year and started Wabi, which she officially opened to all users on Monday. The timing is neat. Personal AI assistants are having a moment, with newcomers like Muse and Instinct promising to sort inboxes, chase flight deals and generally take over the annoying bits of life.

Wabi is Kuyda’s answer to that wave, but she’s nudging it in a different direction. The app works like a messenger, with multiple threads for different tasks and long-term goals. Inside those threads, users can build or use custom apps: a weight-loss tracker in a health thread, for example, or a feed of nearby children’s events in a family thread. That’s a shift from Wabi’s earlier form. TechCrunch covered its launch last year, when it was described as a social platform for making and sharing mini apps, and Wabi had just raised a $20 million pre-seed round.

Kuyda says the team learned something simple: people like software that feels personal, but they don’t necessarily want to spend their time building it. So Wabi 2.0 has the agent decide what to spin up. Connect email, and it creates a set of threads and apps to start from. Users can still ask for custom ones, but the default is meant to do the heavy lifting.

Her bigger bet is that threaded, multiplayer AI will hold up better than the familiar single endless chat. She argues that one long conversation gets buried in context over time, while shared threads can function more like group chats. In her own example, she and her boyfriend use one thread to plan together with apps for music, restaurants, their shared calendar and books. Another thread helps with her daughter’s schedule and Japanese practice. Wabi is free for now, has no business model yet, and Kuyda says the company is talking about raising more money.