Wabi Raises $55 Million at $1.25 Billion Valuation After Agent Pivot

Wabi has raised $55 million at a $1.25 billion valuation, the company said Thursday, marking its entry into the small club of AI startups worth more than a billion dollars after pivoting to become a "personal agent."

The round was led by IVP, whose general partner Alex Lim made a direct case for founder Eugenia Kuyda's track record. "Eugenia has a unique sense for where AI is headed and a track record of great taste in building it," Lim said in a statement. "She has a clear vision for how people will interact with AI, one that goes far beyond the text box or command line. Wabi is the expression of that vision, and we're thrilled to support her."

In plain terms: IVP is paying a ten-figure price for a vision, not yet for a proven product category.

Who is behind Wabi?

Kuyda previously founded Replika, the AI companion startup. Wabi originally focused on letting anyone build apps using prompts. Last month, the startup announced a pivot of sorts to become an AI messenger — Wabi 2.0, as it called the new version.

The idea now is that Wabi could build the interfaces users need to get things done as part of its role as a personal AI agent. The company suggests the tool could create mini apps for tasks like:

• meal planning
• tracking local restaurants
• planning date nights
• creating fitness plans
• designing specialized trivia games

The pitch blends two ideas — an assistant that chats and one that builds its own software on demand. Whether consumers want their messenger to generate widgets for date nights remains an open question the source does not answer.

Who else put money in?

The investor list stretches well beyond IVP. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Forerunner and the Amazon Alexa Fund participated in the round.

Angel investors include a notably cross-industry mix: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, former Yahoo! head Marissa Mayer, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, and Alex Pall — one half of The Chainsmokers.

The presence of three sitting or former major-tech CEOs signals conviction at the top of the industry. It also means Wabi's cap table now holds names whose own companies compete, directly or indirectly, in the same assistant race.

How hot is the AI agent market?

The funding lands amid a crowded race to build the winning AI assistant, with investors spreading out their bets. The market around AI agents is hot right now.

The benchmark case is Instinct, the viral AI agent that pulled in another billion dollars at a $10 billion valuation in September — roughly eight times Wabi's new worth. Even Tolan, which makes a cute, muppet-like AI companion to help people navigate life, just raised $30 million.

For scale: Wabi's $55 million raise is about 5.5 percent of Instinct's reported September round. That gap frames both the opportunity and the competitive pressure Wabi now faces.

The additional funding indicates Wabi's investors agree that its new agentic angle has some potential. Agreement with money, though, is not the same as product-market fit — and the source offers no revenue or user figures to anchor the $1.25 billion price.

What changes with the new money?

The round gives Wabi capital to push Wabi 2.0 as an agent that builds its own interfaces rather than just answering in a chat window. Kuyda's stated wager, via Lim's endorsement, is that people will interact with AI in ways that go beyond text boxes and command lines.

The company has already reinvented itself once — from a prompt-to-build-apps tool to an AI messenger with mini-app generation. The $1.25 billion valuation now rests on that second version delivering what the first promised.

The next test is whether Wabi's agent can turn meal plans and trivia games from demo suggestions into daily habits — before better-funded rivals define the category on their own terms.