Replika’s founder built the AI assistant she pitched at Disrupt 12 years ago

Twelve years ago today, Eugenia Kuyda stood up on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt and presented a conversational chatbot called IO that acted as a lifestyle concierge to help people book restaurants and vacations along with other tasks. 

IO, the first product from her startup Luka, came before the deep learning breakthroughs that would eventually lead to today’s large language models. “It still worked,” Kuyda told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. “It was pretty magical…but, of course, it’s nowhere near what we have today.”

Luka ended up becoming Replika, the popular AI chatbot companion company. Last year, Kuyda left as CEO of Replika and founded Wabi. Last year, Kuyda left as CEO of Replika and founded Wabi.

The technology has finally caught up with her original vision for Luka, just in time for Wabi to take on a wave of new personal AI assistants such as Muse and Instinct, that promise to do everything from manage your inbox to find you the best flight deals. 

On Monday, Kuyda officially launched Wabi for all users, a multiplayer personal AI assistant that functions as a messenger app, allowing users to maintain multiple agentic threads dedicated to different tasks and long-term goals. Within each thread, users can build and use custom apps, like a weight-loss tracker inside a health thread or an app showing nearby children’s events inside a family thread. 

The launch is something of a pivot for Wabi, though Kuyda describes it as more of an evolution. When TechCrunch covered Wabi’s initial launch last year, along with its $20 million pre-seed round, it was described as more of a social platform where you could create mini apps with prompts that you could share with friends or across the app. 

Over the past year, Kuyda said the team realized that while people love personal software rather than “one size fits all solutions in the App Store,” they “maybe don’t want to spend a lot of time, or any time, building it.” 

Threads can also be shared, functioning as group chats.