Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of Replika, has officially launched the Wabi AI app for all users, bringing a personal assistant that works like a messenger app to anyone who downloads it. The launch was on Monday, 19 October 2026. Wabi is free for now, and the company has not yet settled on how it will make money.
Twelve years on, the idea returns
Kuyda first showed a version of this idea twelve years ago, when she presented a chatbot called IO on a conference stage. IO acted as a lifestyle concierge that could help people book restaurants and vacations, and it came from her startup Luka. Luka later became Replika, and Kuyda left as Replika's CEO last year to found Wabi.
Kuyda says the technology has finally caught up with that original vision. Wabi now competes with a wave of new personal AI assistants such as Muse and Instinct, which promise to manage inboxes and find good flight deals.
How Wabi works
Wabi functions as a multiplayer messenger. Users can keep several threads, each dedicated to a task or long-term goal, and build custom apps inside them. A health thread might hold a weight-loss tracker, while a family thread might show nearby children's events.
The product is a shift from Wabi's first version, which was described as a social platform for creating mini apps from prompts that could be shared with friends. When Wabi launched last year with a $20 million pre-seed round, that was the pitch. Kuyda described the change as an evolution, saying the team learned that people want personal software but may not want to spend time building it.
In the new version, called Wabi 2.0, the agent itself decides which apps to build. Once a user connects email, it automatically starts a number of threads and apps, and users can request more or open new threads.
The Wabi AI app is free for now, and Kuyda said the company is in talks to raise more funds. Wabi has not chosen a business model, so pricing for the future is not yet known.
Shared chats and privacy
Kuyda argues that threads should work like group chats rather than separate one-on-one conversations with an AI. She described a shared thread with her partner that includes a live music tracker, a daily relationship question, a restaurant list and a reading list. A family thread in her account tracks her daughter's schedule and quizzes her on Japanese.
Users decide how much to share in a shared chat, from email and calendar details to bank account information. Kuyda said access is scoped to individual chats, and everyone in a chat can see when someone's personal information is requested. Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, a security standard that means its data controls have been independently audited, and it runs entirely in the cloud with most user data stored in the U.S.
Kuyda also pointed to research concerns. According to interviews with AI researchers, the longer a chatbot conversation runs, the more likely it is to hallucinate, meaning it can produce false information, lose track of context or give answers that safety filters would normally block.
Aasan alfaaz mein
Eugenia Kuyda ne Wabi AI app sab users ke liye launch kar di hai. Yeh ek personal AI assistant hai jo messenger ki tarah chalta hai aur alag alag threads mein kaam sambhalta hai. Abhi yeh free hai, lekin company ne kamai ka tareeqa abhi tak tay nahi kiya. Shared chat mein email ya bank ki maloomat daalne se pehle yaad rakhein ke chat ke sab logon ko pata chal jata hai jab personal maloomat maangi jati hai.
