Eugenia Kuyda launches Wabi 2.0, the AI assistant she pitched 12 years ago

Eugenia Kuyda launched Wabi for all users on Monday, delivering the personal AI assistant she first pitched on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 12 years ago — before the technology existed to build it properly.

Her original chatbot, called IO, came from her startup Luka and worked as a lifestyle concierge that booked restaurants and vacations. It predates the deep learning breakthroughs behind today's large language models. "It still worked," Kuyda told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. "It was pretty magical…but, of course, it's nowhere near what we have today."

Luka eventually became Replika, the popular AI companion company. Kuyda left as CEO last year and founded Wabi, which raised a $20 million pre-seed round covered by TechCrunch at its initial launch. The model has changed since then: version one was a social platform where people created mini apps with prompts to share with friends. Wabi 2.0, launched Monday, is a multiplayer personal AI assistant built as a messenger app.

Why did Wabi pivot from build-it-yourself apps?

Kuyda said the team learned over the past year that 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."

So now the agent decides what apps to build. Connect Wabi to your email and it automatically spins up threads and apps to start with. Users can add custom apps or start new threads on top of that.

"It's doing what Instinct and Muse do, but it also has all these apps, which helps users do more stuff," Kuyda said, naming the wave of new personal AI assistants Wabi is taking on — rivals that promise to manage your inbox or find flight deals.

Wabi's structure is its other differentiator. Users maintain multiple agentic threads, each dedicated to different tasks and long-term goals. A weight-loss tracker can live inside a health thread; an app showing nearby children's events can sit in a family thread.

Why does the multi-thread design matter?

Kuyda argues single-thread competitors degrade with use. "It's not just everything in one single thread like with Instinct and Muse, where you get buried in the information that it sends you everyday," she said. "Single thread experiences, if you think about it, get worse over time because it's just so much context in one endless conversation."

That claim has technical backing. The longer an AI chatbot conversation runs, the more likely it is to hallucinate, lose track of context, or respond in ways safety guardrails would otherwise block, according to interviews with AI researchers.

Threads can also be shared, working as group chats. Kuyda walked TechCrunch through her own setup:

• A thread with her boyfriend carries a live music tracker, an app that asks a daily question about their relationship, a running list of restaurant suggestions, shared calendar events, and a list of books they're reading together with next-read suggestions.
• Her family thread includes an app tracking her daughter's schedule, one for finding kid-friendly events nearby, and one that quizzes her daughter on Japanese.

How does Wabi handle privacy?

Within any shared chat, users choose how much to share — from email and calendar information to bank account details. "So my partner can ask Wabi in the chat, 'Is Eugenia free next Thursday?' or 'Did she buy those tickets?'" Kuyda said. Access is scoped to individual chats, and everyone in a chat can see when someone's personal information is requested.

On the broader privacy front, Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, meaning its data security controls have been independently audited. The app runs entirely in the cloud, and most user data is stored in the U.S., Kuyda said.

She frames the multiplayer angle as a continuation of her work at Replika. "My previous company Replika worked on AI that will make people feel…less lonely," Kuyda said. "To a degree, that is [in Wabi] as well. AI can bring people together, even when it comes to just helping you spend time better together in real life, whether it's going out and seeing a concert together or finding the next book that you will read together."

"Today, all the agentic apps are just [conversations] between you and the agent, and I feel like it should be a lot more about bringing people together in a group chat together," she added. "Not you doing it separately with your AI, and I'm doing it separately with my AI…I don't think anyone has yet cracked multi-player."

What comes next for Wabi?

Wabi is free for now, and the company hasn't settled on a business model. Kuyda said Wabi is in talks to raise more funds, giving her a war chest to prove that multiplayer agents — not endless single chats — are the shape of personal AI.