Eugenia Kuyda saw the way forward for consumer AI sooner than most. She founded Replika, the first major AI companion startup, in 2017 before launching ChatGPT. Today it has 35 million users.
Now Kuyda is back with a recent startup called Wabi, which he describes as a YouTube for apps – a social platform where anyone can use prompts to immediately create mini apps and share them with friends. Wabi, which launched in beta last month, heralds the next shift in consumer artificial intelligence: one in which personalized software becomes the norm.
Wabi has raised $20 million in pre-seed funding from an illustrious list of angels, including AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, Replit CEO Amjad Masada, Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, Neuralink co-founder DJ Seo and Conviction founder Sarah Guo.
“[Kuyda] “was early and right for AI companions, regardless that it wasn’t obvious at the time,” Anish Acharya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told TechCrunch. “It’s very rare to come across someone who has the experience of predicting what consumers will want, and we think she’s doing it again.”
Kuyda enters a hot market. Vibe coding tools reminiscent of Cursor and Lovable are attracting strong VC interest, while no-code AI platforms including Emergent, Replit and Bloom are racing to enable non-technical users to build applications using prompts. The difference from Wabi: Integrated platform for creation, discovery and hosting – no app store required.
“It was really built to help people who have nothing to do with coding or the tech world to build apps very quickly based on their everyday lives,” Kuyda, who joined us on stage at Disrupt last week to debate AI companions, told TechCrunch. “Just type ‘build me an AI therapy app’ and that’s it. It will suggest features and you can brainstorm, but it will create the app. You don’t have to be great at suggestions. You never see the code.”
Earlier this week, Wabi rolled out some social features to beta users, reminiscent of the ability to love, comment, and remix any existing app, in addition to check user profiles to see what others have liked, used, or built.
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X has been publicizing Wabi’s case since it began handing out invitations to chose users. Several founders, designers, AND investors from the surrounding area world To have information was published about the ease of making applications by Wabi. Even Google’s product leader DeepMind Logan Kilpatrick shouted at Wabi.
“We believe that the social layer is absolutely key because it allows for much more creativity and discovery, and these mini-apps become the beginning of a community or a conversation,” Kuyda said.
Wabi’s Explore page currently features the latest and popular apps, though Kuyda says it’ll develop into more algorithmic over time. The startup plans to launch personalized onboarding in the coming weeks, mechanically generating startup applications for recent users.
Wabi’s core promise is not much different from ChatGPT’s GPT store or Quora’s Poe bot: Create mini-apps with tooltips that may solve small problems. Apps like Wabi delivered on this promise well because customers didn’t have to establish any technical infrastructure. Even if you only type a few sentences, Wabi will maintain things like creating an icon or establishing databases and deciding what the app’s UI will appear to be.
Kuyda told TechCrunch that for applications that require AI to generate anything, users can open the settings and select a base model (e.g. if they wish to use ChatGPT or Gemini), and even rewrite the prompts displayed by Wabi.
Creating a basic application is easy. However, it’s possible you’ll have to debug your application to avoid errors, which might be expected during the software development lifecycle.
For example, we created an app that showed us a photo of a dog with a fact about the dog every day. After a few days of use, we realized that the app was generating the same set of dogs. When we saw one other user’s each day news app, all the dates listed in the summary photos were October 1, 2023, and the news was several weeks old. Also, oddly enough, one of the news sources was Wikipedia.
The burden of interest in maintaining the application rests with the user. Otherwise, it’s possible you’ll find many unmanaged mini-apps in the discover section of those vibration encoding apps.
Kuyda says it’s still early days for Wabi and the company is still working on the way to ensure the app is ready for immediate launch. She noted that there are still limitations to the model that are improving every day. He says a large portion of the $20 million will go toward growing Wabi’s product team.
Some of the funding may even go towards effectively subsidizing the use of Wabi until the startup comes up with a monetization model. Kuyda says it has no interest in placing ads on the platform, which results in incentives that create dark patterns.
“I created Replika and I never had any advertising,” she said. “I think ads just create a pretty bad user experience. I like to create great user experiences.”
Acharya believes that once network effects start working, it’ll be easy to make money from them. He sees a future where there is an element of professionalization on the platform, where many of today’s kids who wish to develop into TikTok stars could create software on Wabi as a substitute.
“Thinking about the history of YouTube, it started with people sharing dodgy and low-budget content,” he said. “Now, 20 years later, it is a very high production value.”
Acharya added that the software offers much more possibilities because “video content loses value over time,” he said. “Software has compounding value.” If someone creates one other hit app, it’ll proceed to be relevant over time.
The idea suits perfectly into Acharya’s thesis about the way forward for “single-use software” – small, flexible applications that might be created and deleted as easily as opening a recent tab or having a quick conversation in ChatGPT.
“I think software is the final frontier of participation,” Acharya said. “The Internet has become a powerhouse of participation… where anyone can post their thoughts. It’s a bit strange that the Internet is obviously just software, and yet so few people have managed to do this.”
So what does Web 3.0 appear to be when anyone can create and share software in minutes?
“It feels like the internet has become clinical – we all use the same Instagram, the same TikTok, we all have the same home screens, and the apps have become quite monotonous,” he said. “I think the opportunity with Wabi will bring back some of that punk, weird internet ethos from the early 90s.”