Replika’s founder built the AI assistant she pitched at Disrupt 12 years ago
- ID
- 37095
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 20 Oct 2026, 2:49 AM
- Fetched
- 20 Oct 2026, 3:48 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/19/replikas-founder-built-the-ai-assistant-she-pitched-at-disrupt-12-years-ago/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 20 Oct 2026, 3:49 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- ai_agent_usersvibe_coderssaas_founders
What happened
Eugenia Kuyda, who pitched a conversational concierge chatbot called IO at TechCrunch Disrupt 12 years ago and later built Replika, has launched Wabi for all users. Wabi is a 'multiplayer' personal AI assistant built as a messenger app: users keep multiple agentic threads for different tasks and long-term goals, and can build custom mini-apps inside a thread (a weight-loss tracker in a health thread, a local kids'-events app in a family thread). It is a shift from Wabi's earlier framing as a social platform for prompt-built mini-apps shared with friends, which launched alongside a $20 million pre-seed round.
Why it matters
The product pattern worth copying or testing is thread-scoped mini-apps: instead of one chat window, each goal gets its own persistent agent thread with its own small UI. If you're building an agent product, that's a concrete answer to context bloat and re-prompting — and it's a competitive reference point against the wave of personal assistants (Muse, Instinct) pitching inbox and flight management. The pivot itself is the caution: the same team reframed from a shared social mini-app platform to private task threads within about a year, so treat 'share your mini-apps with friends' as an unproven growth loop.
Discussion angle
Wabi moved from shareable prompt-built mini-apps to private per-goal threads — is thread-scoped UI the real unlock for consumer agents, or does splitting tasks across threads just hide the context problem instead of solving it?