- Wabi raised $55 million in a spherical led by IVP, reaching a $1.25 billion valuation.
- The funding got here in simply 31 days after Wabi had pivoted from constructing apps to constructing an AI messenger.
- The corporate will use the brand new funds to develop the product and develop.
Eugenia Kuyda launched IO in 2014, earlier than the deep studying revolution that permits right this moment’s language fashions. She described IO as progressive on the time however restricted by the know-how of the day. 12 years on, her new firm is valued at $1.25B.
Wabi, a San Francisco startup, raised a $55M funding spherical led by IVP with Forerunner, a16z, the Amazon Alexa Fund and various angels together with Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce, Marissa Mayer, CEO and founding father of Dazzle AI, Dick Costolo, and Alex Pall, founding father of The Chainsmokers.
Wabi’s complete funding is now round $75 million. The corporate will use the brand new funds to develop the product and develop.
From constructing mini-apps to making a shared AI agent
Kuyda developed the chatbot that grew to become Replika, following the loss of life of her finest pal in a highway accident in 2015. The corporate grew to tens of tens of millions of customers. Kuyda stepped down as CEO in 2025 to start out Wabi.
Wabi launched in beta in October 2025, letting customers construct mini apps from prompts. Kuyda described it as YouTube for apps, and a number of other angel buyers, together with Naval Ravikant, Garry Tan, and Sarah Guo, backed it.
On twenty eighth September 2026, Kuyda relaunched Wabi as Wabi 2.0, a messenger with a private agent that creates interfaces as wanted. The general public launch was nineteenth October for iOS, Android and Mac, with Home windows to comply with.
The agent has separate threads for various targets. You’ll be able to share threads together with your companions, family and friends in group chats. As an example, a pair may share a restaurant checklist, and a household may create a weekly meal plan and switch it right into a purchasing checklist.
A crowded market with a lower cost tag
Wabi is getting into a market the place valuations are going up quickly. Intuition raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue and is reportedly down to only 14 individuals.
Meta launched its Muse agent on eighth September and had 2.8M downloads within the US and Canada within the first 12 days. Tolan, the AI companion app, raised $30 million on nineteenth October and has over 250k lively customers. In Europe, Nous raised $17 million to assist UK households with their payments by way of an AI agent.
Intuition and Muse each function on the precept of a single dialog between the consumer and their agent. Wabi differs in that it helps a number of threads and lets customers share them. Kuyda argues that single-thread brokers turn into much less efficient because the context in a single chat grows.
The market is sufficiently big to justify trying this strategy. MarketsandMarkets is forecasting the AI brokers market to develop from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030.
What the funding spherical leaves unanswered
Wabi is at the moment free to make use of and has no clear enterprise mannequin. Belief is one other key subject. Customers can share their e-mail, calendar and financial institution particulars in a bunch thread.
Kuyda says entry is restricted to the person chat, and everyone seems to be notified when a consumer requests entry to private knowledge. The early Intuition testers have been fairly involved a few ‘perpetual and irrevocable’ knowledge licence.
It’s nonetheless unclear whether or not individuals really need to share an assistant. In the event that they do, Wabi is properly forward on the group threads entrance. In the event that they don’t, $1.25B is a really excessive value to pay for a free app that hasn’t demonstrated a viable income mannequin.
