Vinod Khosla believes ex-DeepMind engineer’s Wajo will win agent market on trust
- ID
- 32334
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 06 Oct 2026, 11:15 PM
- Fetched
- 06 Oct 2026, 11:41 PM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/06/vinod-khosla-believes-ex-deepmind-engineers-wajo-will-win-agent-market-on-trust/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 06 Oct 2026, 11:41 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- ai_agent_userssaas_foundersdevelopers
What happened
TechCrunch reports Vinod Khosla is betting on Wajo, a personal-agent startup from former Google and DeepMind engineer Shivani Poddar, because he says it is architected for trust and safety first, unlike Meta's Muse or Instinct. Wajo's Fo agent works across iMessage and WhatsApp, offers task cards for scheduling, gifting, and life admin, can call businesses or people, and can hire a human to complete a task. In early tests, an airline upgrade call succeeded, but a reminder call to the author's partner did not go smoothly and disclosures were less clear; the excerpt ends mid-sentence.
Why it matters
If you build or buy personal agents, the concrete signal is that outbound calling is still messy: Wajo completed an airline upgrade call but failed a cat-feeding reminder with unclear disclosures. That makes AI self-identification, consent, and human handoff open product decisions, not solved features; do not treat a VC's trust claim as evidence that the safety layer works.
Discussion angle
Should an agent be required to identify itself as AI on every outbound call, and what failure conditions should force a handoff to a human?