- Wabi raised $55 million in a round led by IVP, reaching a $1.25 billion valuation.
- The funding came in just 31 days after Wabi had pivoted from building apps to building an AI messenger.
- The company will use the new funds to develop the product and expand.
Eugenia Kuyda launched IO in 2014, before the deep learning revolution that enables today’s language models. She described IO as innovative at the time but limited by the technology of the day. 12 years on, her new company is valued at $1.25B.
Wabi, a San Francisco startup, raised a $55M funding round led by IVP with Forerunner, a16z, the Amazon Alexa Fund and a number of angels including Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce, Marissa Mayer, CEO and founder of Dazzle AI, Dick Costolo, and Alex Pall, founder of The Chainsmokers.
Wabi’s total funding is now around $75 million. The company will use the new funds to develop the product and expand.
From building mini-apps to creating a shared AI agent
Kuyda developed the chatbot that became Replika, following the death of her best friend in a road accident in 2015. The company grew to tens of millions of users. Kuyda stepped down as CEO in 2025 to start Wabi.
Wabi launched in beta in October 2025, letting users build mini apps from prompts. Kuyda described it as YouTube for apps, and several angel investors, including Naval Ravikant, Garry Tan, and Sarah Guo, backed it.
On 28th September 2026, Kuyda relaunched Wabi as Wabi 2.0, a messenger with a personal agent that creates interfaces as needed. The public launch was 19th October for iOS, Android and Mac, with Windows to follow.
The agent has separate threads for different goals. You can share threads with your partners, friends and family in group chats. For instance, a couple could share a restaurant list, and a family could create a weekly meal plan and turn it into a shopping list.
A crowded market with a lower price tag
Wabi is entering a market where valuations are going up rapidly. Instinct raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue and is reportedly down to just 14 people.
Meta launched its Muse agent on 8th September and had 2.8M downloads in the US and Canada in the first 12 days. Tolan, the AI companion app, raised $30 million on 19th October and has over 250k active users. In Europe, Nous raised $17 million to help UK households with their bills via an AI agent.
Instinct and Muse both operate on the principle of a single conversation between the user and their agent. Wabi differs in that it supports multiple threads and lets users share them. Kuyda argues that single-thread agents become less effective as the context in a single chat grows.
The market is big enough to justify attempting this approach. MarketsandMarkets is forecasting the AI agents market to grow from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030.
What the funding round leaves unanswered
Wabi is currently free to use and has no clear business model. Trust is another key issue. Users can share their email, calendar and bank details in a group thread.
Kuyda says access is limited to the individual chat, and everyone is notified when a user requests access to personal data. The early Instinct testers were quite concerned about a ‘perpetual and irrevocable’ data licence.
It’s still unclear whether people actually want to share an assistant. If they do, Wabi is well ahead on the group threads front. If they don’t, $1.25B is a very high price to pay for a free app that hasn’t demonstrated a viable revenue model.
