Eugenia Koeda saw the future of consumer AI before anyone else. She founded Replika, the first major AI companion startup, in 2017 years before launching ChatGPT. Today it has 35 million users.
Now Kuyda is back with a new startup called Wabi, which it describes as the YouTube of Apps — a social platform where anyone can use prompts to instantly create mini apps and share them with friends. Wabi, which launched in beta last month, is a harbinger of another shift in consumer AI: where custom software becomes the norm.
Wabi has raised $20 million in seed funding from a stellar roster of angels, including AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, Replit CEO Amjad Massad, Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, Neuralink co-founder DJ Seo, and Conviction founder Sarah Gu.
“[Kuyda] It was early and Right to AI comrades“Although it wasn’t clear at the time,” Anish Acharya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told TechCrunch, “It’s very rare to find someone with a proven track record of predicting what consumers want, and we believe she’s doing it again.”
Kuyda enters a hot market. Bio-coding tools like Cursor and Lovable have attracted significant VC interest, while no-code AI platforms, including Emergent, Replit and Bloom, are racing to let non-technical users build applications from prompts. The Wabi Difference: An all-in-one platform for creating, discovering, and hosting – no app store required.
“This is really designed to help people who don’t have anything to do with programming or the tech world create apps out of their everyday lives very quickly,” Koeda, who joined us last week on stage at Disable To discuss AI companions, TechCrunch said. “All you have to do is build an app for AI therapy, and that’s it. It will suggest features and you can brainstorm ideas, but it will build you an app. You don’t need to be good at prompting. You’ll never see the code.”
Earlier this week, Wabi released some social features for beta users — things like the ability to like, comment on, and remix any existing app, as well as checking out user profiles to see what others have liked, used, or created.
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X has been raving about Wabi since it started sending out invitations to select users. numerous Founders, Designers, and Investors around her the world He owns It was posted about how easy it was for Wabi to create apps for themselves. Even Google’s DeepMind product is the leader Logan Kilpatrick screamed wabby.
“We think social class is very important because it allows for more creativity and discovery, and these mini apps become a community starter or conversation starter,” Koeda said.
Wabi’s Explore page currently features recent and popular apps, though Kuyda said it will become more algorithmic over time. The startup plans to launch a custom onboarding process in the coming weeks, automatically creating initial apps for new users.
Wabi’s core promise isn’t much different from ChatGPT’s GPT store or Quora’s Poe bot: build small apps with prompts that can solve small problems for you. Apps like Wabi have been able to deliver on this promise well in that customers don’t have to set up any technical infrastructure. Even if you just enter a few sentences, Wabi handles things like creating code or setting up databases, and determining what your app’s UI will look like.
For apps that require anything to be generated by AI, users can open Settings, choose their base model (such as whether they want to use ChatGPT or Gemini) and even rewrite the prompts that Wabi comes with, Koeda told TechCrunch.
Creating a basic application is simple. However, you may need to debug the application to avoid errors, which is expected in the development life cycle.
For example, we created an app that shows us a picture of a dog every day along with a fact about the dog. After a few days of use, we realized that the app was producing the same batch of dogs. When we viewed another user’s daily news app, all the dates mentioned in the summary images were October 1, 2023, while the news items were a few weeks old. In addition, one of the news sources was, oddly enough, Wikipedia.
It is the user’s responsibility to be concerned with application maintenance. Otherwise, you may find a lot of unmanaged applets in the discovery section of these dynamic programming applications.
Kuyda says it’s still early days for Wabi and they’re still working on how to make sure the apps are ready to go out of the box. She noted that there are still typical restrictions that are improving every day. A significant portion of the $20 million will go toward building out Wabi’s product team, she says.
A portion of the funds is also directed toward actively supporting the use of Wabi until the startup comes up with a monetization model. Koeda says she is not interested in hosting ads on the platform, which creates incentives that create dark patterns.
“I’m built Replica “I had no ads at all,” she said. “I think ads create a very poor user experience. I like to create delightful user experiences.”
Acharya believes that once the network effects kick in, it will be easier to monetize. He sees a future where there is an element of professionalization that will happen on the platform, where many kids today who want to become TikTok stars can make shows on Wabi instead.
“When you think about the history of YouTube, it started with people putting together fragile, low-budget content experiences,” he said. “Now, 20 years later, the production value is very high.”
There are greater opportunities with software because “video content deteriorates in value over time,” Acharya added. “Software has compound value.” If someone builds the next hit app, they will remain relevant over time.
The idea fits perfectly with Acharya’s thesis about the future of “disposable software” — small, flexible applications that people can create and dispose of as easily as opening a new tab or having a quick conversation with ChatGPT.
“I believe software is the final frontier for engagement,” Acharya said. “The Internet has been such a driving force for participation… that anyone can publish their ideas. It’s strange that the Internet is software, and yet so few people have been able to make it happen.”
So what does Web 3.0 look like when everyone can create and share software in just a few minutes?
“It seems like the internet has become kind of clinical — we’re all using the same Instagram, the same TikTok, we’re all having the same home screens, and the apps have become very monotonous,” he said. “I think the opportunity with Wabi is that it will bring back some of the weird, weird spirit of the early ’90s web.”