Twelve years after Eugenia Kuyda pitched IO at TechCrunch Disrupt, the technology has finally caught up with her original vision. IO was a lifestyle concierge that booked restaurants and vacations; Kuyda told TechCrunch it worked and felt magical, but it was nowhere near today’s large language models. That startup, Luka, later became Replika. Kuyda left the CEO role last year and founded Wabi, which she opened to all users on Monday.
From one chatbot to many threads
Wabi is a multiplayer personal AI assistant built as a messenger app. Instead of a single endless chat, users maintain multiple agentic threads dedicated to specific tasks and long-term goals. Each thread can host custom mini-apps—for example, a weight-loss tracker inside a health thread or an app for nearby children’s events in a family thread. When a user connects email, Wabi automatically spins up starter threads and apps; people can then request more.
Kuyda frames the multi-thread design as the main differentiator from single-thread assistants like Muse and Instinct. She argues that a single conversation accumulates context and gets worse over time. TechCrunch notes that longer chats can increase hallucination, context loss, and guardrail failures. Wabi threads can also be shared as group chats, which Kuyda says no one has cracked yet.
In a couples' thread Kuyda showed TechCrunch, apps along the top included:
- A live music tracker for concerts the two might attend together
- A daily relationship question
- A running list of restaurant suggestions
- Shared calendar events and a joint reading list with next-book picks
Access is scoped per chat, and everyone in the chat can see when someone’s personal information is requested.
Privacy, pricing, and the road ahead
Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, meaning its data security controls have been independently audited. It runs entirely in the cloud, and most user data is stored in the U.S., Kuyda said. The product is free for now; Wabi hasn't settled on a business model and is in talks to raise more funds after a $20 million pre-seed round last year.
Kuyda sees Wabi as more than a personal assistant. Her previous company worked on AI to make people less lonely, and she believes shared threads can bring people together in real life—whether by finding a concert or picking the next book to read together. That social, multi-thread bet is the clearest signal yet that portable AI assistants may move beyond the solo chatbot.