Replika's Founder Built the AI Assistant She Pitched at Disrupt 12 Years Ago β Now It's Finally Ready
From Luka's IO to Wabi: A 12-Year Vision Realized
Twelve years ago today, Eugenia Kuyda took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to present IO, a conversational chatbot from her startup Luka that served as a lifestyle concierge β helping users book restaurants, plan vacations, and handle other everyday tasks.
IO predated the deep learning breakthroughs that would eventually give rise 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 ultimately evolved into Replika, the popular AI companion company. Last year, Kuyda stepped down as CEO of Replika and founded Wabi.
The Technology Finally Caught Up
The underlying technology has now caught up with Kuyda's original vision for Luka β just in time for Wabi to compete with a new wave of personal AI assistants, including Muse and Instinct, which promise to handle everything from inbox management to finding the best flight deals.
our launch video from 2015 β Luka later pivoted into @replika. we were building personal agents 11 years ago!
β Eugenia Kuyda (@ekuyda), October 7, 2026
Wabi 2.0: A Multiplayer Personal AI Assistant
On Monday, Kuyda officially launched Wabi for all users. The product is a multiplayer personal AI assistant that functions like a messenger app, letting users maintain multiple agentic threads dedicated to different tasks and long-term goals. Within each thread, users can build and use custom apps β for example, a weight-loss tracker inside a health thread or an app showing nearby children's events inside a family thread.
The launch represents something of a pivot for Wabi, though Kuyda frames it as more of an evolution. When TechCrunch first covered Wabi's initial launch last year, alongside its $20 million pre-seed round, it was positioned as a social platform where users could create mini apps via prompts and share them with friends or across the app.
Letting the Agent Do the Building
Over the past year, Kuyda said the team realized that while people love personal software over "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."
With Wabi 2.0, the agent decides which apps to build. The moment you connect it to your email, it automatically spins up a set of threads and apps to get started, and users can extend that by requesting custom apps or starting new threads.
"It's doing what Instinct and Muse do, but it also has all these apps, which helps users do more stuff," Kuyda said.
Multi-Threaded, Multiplayer Design
App-building isn't Wabi's only differentiator. Kuyda is also betting on the product's multi-threaded, multiplayer design β a structure that separates workflows by context and invites collaboration rather than funneling everything into a single chatbot conversation.
For Kuyda, the launch closes a loop that began with IO on the Disrupt stage in 2014: a personal AI assistant that can actually deliver on the promise she first pitched more than a decade ago.