Eugenia Kuida saw the future of consumer AI before anyone else. She founded Replika, the first major AI companion startup, in 2017, a few years before ChatGPT launched. It currently has 35 million users.
Now, Kuida is back with a new startup called Wabi. She describes it as YouTube for apps. It’s a social platform where anyone can instantly create mini-apps using prompts and share them with friends. Wabi, released in beta last month, heralds a new shift in consumer AI where personalized software becomes the norm.
Wabi has raised $20 million in pre-seed funding from a distinguished list of angels, including AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, Replit CEO Amjad Maead, Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, Neuralink co-founder DJ Seo, and Conviction founder Sarah Guo.
“Although it wasn’t obvious at the time,[Quida]had the right idea early on in the AI community,” Anish Acharya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told TechCrunch. “It’s very rare to find someone who has a track record of predicting what consumers want. And we think she’s going to do it again.”
Qida is entering a hot market. Vibe coding tools like Cursor and Lovable are attracting significant VC interest, while no-code AI platforms like Emergent, Replit, and Bloom are vying to help non-technical users build apps through prompts. The Wabi difference: A unified platform for creation, discovery, and hosting — no app store required.
“This was built to allow people who have no connection to the coding or tech world to create apps very quickly out of their everyday lives,” Kuyda, who joined the Disrupt stage last week to discuss AI Companion, told TechCrunch. “All you have to do is type, ‘Build an AI therapy app,’ and that’s it. It suggests features, you can brainstorm, and it builds the app for you. You don’t have to be great at prompts; you never see the code.”
Earlier this week, Wabi released certain social features to beta users. This includes the ability to like, comment, and remix existing apps, and check user profiles to see what others have liked, used, and built.
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X has been making a fuss about Wabi ever since it started distributing invitations to certain users. Several founders, designers, and investors from around the world have posted about Wabi’s ease of creating apps. Even Google DeepMind Product Lead Logan Kilpatrick praised Wabi.
“We believe the social layer is very important because it greatly increases creativity and discovery, and these mini-apps become community starters and conversation starters,” Kuida said.
Wabi’s Explore page currently features recent and popular apps, but Kuyda says the algorithm will become more robust over time. The startup plans to begin personalized onboarding and automatically generate a starter app for new users in the coming weeks.
Wabi’s core promise is not that different from ChatGPT’s GPT store or Quora’s Poe’s bot. “Build mini-apps using prompts that can solve small problems.” Apps like Wabi have been able to package this promise nicely in that customers don’t have to set up any technical infrastructure. Even if you just enter a few sentences, Wabi will create icons, set up the database, and determine the app’s UI.
Kuyda told TechCrunch that for apps that require AI generation, users can go into settings, choose a base model (such as whether they want to use ChatGPT or Gemini), and even rewrite the prompts that Wabi comes up with.
Creating a basic app is easy. However, the development lifecycle may require you to debug your app to avoid expected errors.
For example, we created an app that displays a photo of a dog every day along with facts about dogs. After using it for a few days, I noticed that the app was generating the same set of dogs. When I looked at another user’s Daily News app, the date listed in the summary photo was all October 1, 2023, but the news items were several weeks old. And, oddly enough, one of the sources of the news was Wikipedia.
It is the user’s responsibility to take care of the maintenance of the app. Otherwise, you might find a lot of unmanaged mini-apps in the discovery section of these vibecoding apps.
Kuida said Wabi is still in its early stages and is still figuring out how to make the app ready to use out of the box. She pointed out that the limitations of the model still exist and that they are being improved every day. She says the bulk of the $20 million will go toward building Wabi’s product team.
A portion of the funding will also be used to effectively subsidize the use of Wabi until the startup establishes a monetization model. Kuida said he has no interest in hosting ads on platforms that lead to incentives that create dark patterns.
“I built Replika and there were no ads at all,” she said. “I think ads just create a pretty bad user experience. I like creating a fun user experience.”
Acharya believes that once the network effect takes off, monetization will be easy. He sees a future where there will be an element of professionalization on the platform, where many of today’s kids who want to become TikTok stars might build software on Wabi instead.
“If you think about the history of YouTube, it started with giving people an unstable, low-budget content experience,” he said. “Now, 20 years later, production values are very high.”
Acharya added that there are more opportunities for software as “the value of video content decays over time.” “Software has compounding value.” Even if someone develops the next hit app, it will remain relevant over time.
This idea fits perfectly into Acharya’s paper on the future of “disposable software.” It’s a small, flexible app that people can create and destroy as easily as opening a new tab or chatting easily on ChatGPT.
“I think software is the final frontier of participation,” Acharya said. “The Internet is a powerhouse of participation…a place where anyone can post their thoughts. It’s strange in some ways that so few people are able to do that when the Internet is obviously all software.”
So what is Web 3.0, where anyone can build and share software within minutes?
“I feel like the internet has become kind of clinical. We’re all using the same Instagram, we’re all using the same TikTok, we’re all using the same home screen, and the apps have become pretty monotonous,” he said. “I think Wabi’s opportunity is to revive the punk, weird web spirit of the early ’90s.”
