Just ten days after opening its new AI assistant to the public, Wabi has secured backing from IVP, Andreessen Horowitz and a remarkable group of tech founders.
Eugenia Kuyda has spent more than a decade trying to change how people interact with AI. Her first major success, Replika, gave millions of people an AI companion. Her latest company, Wabi, wants to take that relationship beyond conversation.
On Thursday, Wabi announced a $55 million Series A led by IVP at a $1.25 billion valuation, just ten days after launching its redesigned personal AI assistant to the public.
Andreessen Horowitz, Forerunner and Amazon's Alexa Fund joined the round. The angel investors read like a technology industry guest list: Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Alex Pall of The Chainsmokers.
The investment follows a $20 million pre-seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz in November 2025, bringing Wabi's announced funding to $75 million.
But the product investors are backing today is different from the one Wabi originally introduced.
Last year, Kuyda pitched a platform where anyone could create small applications by describing what they wanted. Users could share those apps, discover creations made by others and modify them without writing code.
It was an attempt to make software creation as accessible as posting a video.
In September, Wabi changed course. Rather than asking people to build their own apps, the company began developing an assistant that could create them automatically as part of everyday conversations.
The redesigned product, Wabi 2.0, launched publicly on October 19.
Instead of interacting with one AI chatbot, users can organize different areas of their lives into separate conversations. An assistant might create a shared restaurant list for a couple, a calendar for a family or a fitness tracker for a group of friends.
These aren't just answers that disappear into a chat history. Wabi generates small interfaces that people can return to, update and share.
That distinction is central to Kuyda's pitch.
AI assistants have become increasingly capable of researching information, writing code and carrying out tasks, but much of that work still happens inside a conventional chat window. Wabi is betting that people want software they can actually use, rather than having to repeatedly ask an assistant for the same information.
The product is also designed for groups. Friends and families can interact with the same agent, coordinate plans and maintain shared information without switching between calendars, messaging apps and other services.
In an October interview with TechCrunch, Kuyda demonstrated shared threads that tracked concerts, restaurant recommendations, books and family activities.
It's an idea with roots in her first startup. Before Replika, Kuyda developed Luka, an early conversational assistant intended to help people find restaurants and make plans. That product eventually evolved into Replika, which focused on AI companionship instead.
Wabi brings her back to the original ambition, this time with models capable of generating software on demand.
The timing is significant. Consumer AI agents have become a crowded investment category, with companies such as Instinct and Meta's Muse competing to become the assistant people use throughout the day.
Wabi's approach is to combine those capabilities with a persistent, shared interface.
There are still substantial questions about the business.
The company has not disclosed its number of active users, retention figures or revenue. Wabi is currently free, and Kuyda said earlier this month that the startup had not settled on a monetization model.
Its shared-assistant approach also introduces privacy challenges. Users can connect personal information such as calendars and email, making clear permissions and reliable controls particularly important when agents operate in conversations involving several people.
For now, investors are backing Kuyda's experience building consumer AI products and her belief that the next widely adopted assistant will look less like a chatbot and more like software people share.
Wabi's $1.25 billion valuation is an expensive bet on that idea, particularly for a product that has only recently emerged from its latest redesign.
Whether users return to those generated apps, and eventually pay for them, will determine whether that bet pays off.
Sources: Wabi announcement · TechCrunch · TechCrunch interview · a16z