A different product, twelve years on
On October 20, 2014, Eugenia Kuyda pitched IO at TechCrunch Disrupt. It was the first product from her startup, Luka: a conversational concierge meant to book restaurants, plan vacations, and handle the other small logistics of a life. It arrived before the deep-learning advances associated with today’s large language models.
Looking back, she told TechCrunch the old bot was not a dead demo.
It still worked… It was pretty magical…but, of course, it’s nowhere near what we have today.
Nostalgia makes an easy frame. But the story is the product change. TechCrunch reports that Kuyda has launched Wabi for general availability: a personal assistant built as a messenger, meant to be used with other people rather than alone. In one passage the coverage calls it Wabi 2.0. TechCrunch reports she left the CEO role at Replika last year and founded Wabi. TechCrunch says Luka ended up becoming Replika.
IO was a chat that tried to complete errands. The Wabi demos are persistent little tools inside ongoing threads. That is not the same concierge, finally shipping.
What she actually showed
Users keep separate threads for different tasks and longer goals. Inside a thread, the assistant can generate a custom app instead of answering with another paragraph. Connect email, and Wabi creates a batch of starter threads and apps on its own. TechCrunch did not say how many.
The examples are specific enough to be useful. A health thread with a weight-loss tracker. A family thread with a daughter’s schedule, nearby kid-friendly events, and Japanese quizzes. A shared thread with her boyfriend: a live-music tracker, a daily relationship question, restaurant suggestions, shared-calendar events, and a joint reading list.
A calendar can mark Thursday open. It will not also hold the concert list, the book two people are reading, and a quiz written for one child. That pile usually lives in a spreadsheet and a group text. She calls the alternative personal software. She told TechCrunch that people want it rather than “one size fits all solutions in the App Store, ” and that they “maybe don’t want to spend a lot of time, or any time, building it.”
IO was pitched to book the restaurant. These demos suggest restaurants, then keep a tracker, a list, and a quiz alive in the same thread. Twelve years on, that is a change of product.
The earlier Wabi still made you the builder
This is not how Wabi started. In November 2025, TechCrunch covered it as a social platform for mini apps. You described what you wanted, the system generated it, and other people could use it, like it, or remix it. The branding then was “the YouTube of apps.” Treat that as a promoter’s analogy, not a measure of usage or retention.
TechCrunch reported a $20 million pre-seed with that launch, a large round for the pre-seed label. A Tech Funding News account of the round named Naval Ravikant and Y Combinator’s Garry Tan among the backers. Those names belong to that raise, not the round being discussed now.
On September 29, 2026, TechCrunch covered a shift from app maker to messaging experience. The general-availability launch is that idea, opened to everyone. The first Wabi asked people to create and remix. This one asks an agent to build inside a conversation that already has a job.
That is the actual change worth underwriting. The tracker, the list, the small tool a household would otherwise keep alive by hand. Personal software, in this pitch, is a junk drawer that can be generated and then kept current, without a product manager assigned to the drawer.
What the group chat actually did
Kuyda’s competitive claim should stay hers. She told TechCrunch that Wabi is “doing what Instinct and Muse do, but it also has all these apps, which helps users do more stuff.” She argues those products bury you in one conversation:
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 also said single-thread experiences get worse over time, “because it’s just so much context in one endless conversation.” TechCrunch cited unnamed AI researchers on hallucination, context loss, and strained safety guardrails in long chats. No paper was named.
“I don’t think anyone has yet cracked multi-player, ” she said. In her telling, agentic apps are still a private conversation between one person and one agent, and the agent belongs in the group chat instead.
What she demonstrated is narrower than that claim, and more concrete. Shared state: one thread, a few apps the people in it can see, and selected personal data the group can ask about.
So my partner can ask Wabi in the chat, ‘Is Eugenia free next Thursday?’ or ‘Did she buy those tickets?’
She tied that social aim to the last company in one line. Replika, she told TechCrunch, worked on AI that would make people feel less lonely. She sees some of that in Wabi, pointed outward: help people spend real time together, a concert or a shared book.
Nothing in the reporting shows a sales team on this product. The demos are a weight tracker, a child’s schedule, and a couple’s reading list. The business reading is an analogy, not a case study. Three people do not need three private agents summarizing the same account and forwarding screenshots. They need one thread that retires an inbox. Wabi has not shown that. A buyer can still use it as the test.
Thread design is an operating choice either way. Separate workstreams for separate goals. Do not dump the quarter into one chat and hope the model still remembers March.
What a shared chat can touch
Shared state is also how you leak a deal, a calendar, or a balance.
TechCrunch reports that shared chats can include selected personal information, from email and calendar data through to bank-account details. Access is scoped to the individual chat. People in that chat can see when personal information is requested. The reporting does not say whether a request needs an explicit yes, or whether the group merely sees the pull after it happens. Do not fill that gap with a generous reading.
Kuyda says Wabi runs entirely in the cloud and that most user data is stored in the United States. TechCrunch reported that the company is SOC 2 compliant, and explained that as independently audited data-security controls. In practice, that phrase means a SOC 2 report exists. The coverage does not say whether it was Type I or Type II, which Trust Services Criteria were in scope, whether bank details were part of the review, or who inside the company can see a shared thread.
If you would not paste account numbers into a group text, do not assume an agent thread is a stricter room because a compliance badge is on the website.
The category is already having this fight in public. A TechCrunch headline on August 24, 2026 said Instinct was raising privacy and security concerns. Usefulness, in this generation of assistants, keeps asking for credentials. The vendors that earn trust will make the scope boringly obvious: what was connected, who can ask, what came back, and how to revoke it before the meeting ends.
Free, and already moved once
TechCrunch reports that Wabi is free for now, has not settled a business model, and is in talks to raise more money. No target, investor list, valuation, user count, or price has been disclosed for that next round.
Hold the dates apart. Around the pre-seed, Tech Funding News described an intention to make money through premium app marketplaces, subscriptions, and professional tools. That was a plan in a previous chapter. It is not a current rate card.
A free agent with an unsettled business model is a reasonable pilot only if you treat it as a pilot: no price, no published retention numbers, and a product that has already moved from a mini-app feed to a messenger. It is a poor place to park a workflow you cannot afford to move.
The launch also leaves the continuity question open. If the company pivots again, or the free tier ends, what happens to the threads, the generated apps, and the connected accounts, and how fast can access be revoked? Until that is written down, the interesting demo and the production workflow should not be the same system.
Questions worth asking first
- What actually shipped?
TechCrunch reports a general-availability Wabi: a messenger-style personal assistant with multiple threads, shared chats, and custom apps generated inside those threads. “Wabi 2.0” appears once in the coverage, as the publication’s label, not as a name the company is shown adopting.
- How is this different from the mini-app Wabi?
The 2025 product was a social feed of prompt-built apps people could share and remix, backed by a reported $20 million pre-seed. The later pitch has the agent build software inside ongoing shared threads, so the user spends less time constructing it.
- Are Instinct and Muse really one overloaded chat?
That is Kuyda’s comparison, not an independent review. Her case is separate threads, in-thread apps, and a group chat. The reporting does not prove competitors lack those features.
- Do long chats reliably break an assistant?
Kuyda argues a single endless thread gets worse as context piles up. TechCrunch cited unnamed researchers on hallucination and context loss, and named no study. Treat it as a design caution, not a measured law.
- Can a shared chat see bank details?
TechCrunch lists bank-account details among the personal data a shared chat can include, with access scoped to that chat and visibility when data is requested. It does not say whether approval is required first, or what the SOC 2 report covered.
- What does it cost, and who is in the next round?
It is free, the business model is unsettled, and the company is seeking more capital. No amount, valuation, user count, or price was disclosed. Ravikant and Tan were named by Tech Funding News for the earlier pre-seed, not this raise.
- If it pivots again, or free ends, what happens to your threads?
The reporting does not say what happens to threads, generated apps, or connected accounts, or how fast access can be revoked. Ask that before a workflow depends on the product.
The 2014 pitch was a concierge. The 2025 pitch was a feed. The version now in general availability is an agent that writes small software for a specific group and keeps the work in threads they share. If that pattern holds, the group chat becomes a deployment environment, not just a place to paste links.
Before connecting an account, underwrite three dull things: how work is split across threads, exactly which credentials a shared chat can touch, and what the workflow costs and where it lives on the day free ends. Personal software is a serious idea. Unscoped access is how serious ideas become incidents.