By Hamza Faisal
Wabi, the consumer AI startup founded by Replika creator Eugenia Kuyda, has raised $55 million in new funding at a $1.25 billion valuation, betting that the next winning personal AI assistant will live in group chats rather than private one-to-one conversations. The round, announced on Thursday, was led by IVP, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Forerunner and the Amazon Alexa Fund.
Well-known angel investors joined the round too, including Shopify chief executive Tobi Lütke, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, former Yahoo head Marissa Mayer, former Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo and musician Alex Pall. The company said the money will fund product development and expansion, though it did not disclose user numbers or revenue.
From app builder to AI messenger
Wabi did not start out as an agent company. Launched last year by Kuyda, its original pitch let anyone build small apps simply by writing prompts. That changed last month with Wabi 2.0, a pivot to an AI messenger that drops an agent into shared conversations and builds the interfaces people need on the spot.
The idea is that a personal agent should not just chat with one person. Instead, Wabi combines an AI agent, personalised mini-apps and shared spaces in a single app, so couples, families and friends can plan together. The company points to mini-apps for meal planning, tracking local restaurants, planning date nights, building fitness plans and designing trivia games as the kind of thing Wabi can spin up on demand inside a chat.
Kuyda calls Wabi a potential operating system for life, a place where people, their tools and their AI come together. She has said AI should not just save people time, but help them spend it better, doing more of what they love with the people they love.
A $1.25 billion bet on the founder and the category
The valuation stands out because Wabi's current product is only weeks old in its present form. Investors appear to be pricing in Kuyda's track record and the heat around personal AI agents rather than proven usage. Kuyda previously built Replika, the AI companion app that drew more than 35 million users, before stepping down as its chief executive in early 2025 to launch Wabi.
IVP general partner Alex Lim said Kuyda has a unique sense of where AI is headed and a clear vision for how people will interact with it beyond the text box or command line. Andreessen Horowitz, which led Wabi's $20 million pre-seed round in November 2025, stayed on as a participant, meaning the startup has now raised $75 million across two rounds in about a year.
The round also lands at a crowded moment for personal agents. OpenAI debuted its agent Dots in September, Meta introduced its assistant Muse the same month, viral AI agent Instinct raised another billion dollars in September at a $10 billion valuation, and companion startup Tolan recently raised $30 million. Wabi's wager is that the shared space, not the solo chat, is where a personal agent earns its keep.
What comes next
For now, Wabi remains free to use, with no finalized monetisation model. That makes the next test straightforward: whether groups actually keep using an agent that builds throwaway apps inside their chats, or whether the novelty fades once the first few dinner plans are made.
If group coordination proves sticky, Wabi could carve out a distinct corner of consumer AI. If not, the $1.25 billion valuation will stand as another marker of how much investors will pay for a founder, a category and a pivot, before the users arrive.
