Can Replika’s founder out-run Meta’s Muse and Instinct? — TFN

• Wabi raised $55 million in a spherical led by IVP, reaching a $1.25 billion valuation.
• The funding got here in simply 31 days after Wabi had pivoted from constructing apps to constructing an AI messenger.
• The corporate will use the brand new funds to develop the product and broaden.

Eugenia Kuyda launched IO in 2014, earlier than the deep studying revolution that allows right this moment’s language fashions. She described IO as modern on the time however restricted by the expertise of the day. 12 years on, her new firm is valued at $1.25B.

Wabi, a San Francisco startup, raised a $55M funding spherical led by IVP with Forerunner, a16z, the Amazon Alexa Fund and quite a lot of angels together with Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce, Marissa Mayer, CEO and founding father of Dazzle AI, Dick Costolo, and Alex Pall, founding father of The Chainsmokers.

Wabi’s complete funding is now round $75 million. The corporate will use the brand new funds to develop the product and broaden.

From constructing mini-apps to making a shared AI agent

Kuyda developed the chatbot that grew to become Replika, following the loss of life of her greatest buddy in a highway accident in 2015. The corporate grew to tens of hundreds of thousands of customers. Kuyda stepped down as CEO in 2025 to start out Wabi.

Wabi launched in beta in October 2025, letting customers construct mini apps from prompts. Kuyda described it as YouTube for apps, and several other angel traders, together with Naval Ravikant, Garry Tan, and Sarah Guo, backed it.

On twenty eighth September 2026, Kuyda relaunched Wabi as Wabi 2.0, a messenger with a private agent that creates interfaces as wanted. The general public launch was nineteenth October for iOS, Android and Mac, with Home windows to observe.

The agent has separate threads for various objectives. You may share threads together with your companions, family and friends in group chats. For example, a pair might share a restaurant checklist, and a household might create a weekly meal plan and switch it right into a purchasing checklist.

A crowded market with a lower cost tag

Wabi is getting into a market the place valuations are going up quickly. Intuition raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue and is reportedly down to simply 14 folks.

Meta launched its Muse agent on eighth September and had 2.8M downloads within the US and Canada within the first 12 days. Tolan, the AI companion app, raised $30 million on nineteenth October and has over 250k lively customers. In Europe, Nous raised $17 million to assist UK households with their payments by way of an AI agent.

Intuition and Muse each function on the precept of a single dialog between the person and their agent. Wabi differs in that it helps a number of threads and lets customers share them. Kuyda argues that single-thread brokers turn into much less efficient because the context in a single chat grows.

The market is sufficiently big to justify trying this strategy. MarketsandMarkets is forecasting the AI brokers market to develop from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030.

What the funding spherical leaves unanswered

Wabi is at the moment free to make use of and has no clear enterprise mannequin. Belief is one other key challenge. Customers can share their e mail, calendar and financial institution particulars in a gaggle thread.

Kuyda says entry is proscribed to the person chat, and everyone seems to be notified when a person requests entry to non-public knowledge. The early Intuition testers have been fairly involved a few ‘perpetual and irrevocable’ knowledge licence.

It’s nonetheless unclear whether or not folks truly wish to share an assistant. In the event that they do, Wabi is nicely forward on the group threads entrance. In the event that they don’t, $1.25B is a really excessive value to pay for a free app that hasn’t demonstrated a viable income mannequin.