Wabi, the personal AI assistant built by Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda, opened to all users on Monday, October 19, 2026 — a messenger-style assistant that splits your life into separate agentic threads and builds its own mini apps inside them. Why it matters: most AI assistants are a single endless chat between you and a bot. Wabi is betting the future is shared threads you run with other people.
October 19, 2026
What happened
Kuyda officially launched Wabi for all users on Monday, ending an invite-only rollout. The app is available on iOS, Android and Mac, and it works less like a chatbot window and more like a messaging app: you keep multiple threads, each with its own agent dedicated to a task or a long-term goal. Inside a thread, Wabi builds and runs small custom apps — a weight-loss tracker inside a health thread, or a finder for nearby children’s events inside a family thread.
The launch is a relaunch. Wabi first appeared last year alongside a $20 million pre-seed round, pitched as a social platform where users created mini apps with prompts and shared them. Over the past year the team concluded that people love personal software but do not want to spend time building it. In Wabi 2.0, the agent decides which apps to build. Connect your email and it automatically spins up starter threads and apps; you can then ask for more or start new threads yourself.
The details worth knowing
Wabi’s clearest difference from rivals like Muse and Instinct is that threads can be shared, turning them into group chats. In Kuyda’s own shared thread with her partner, apps track live music, ask a daily relationship question, keep a running restaurant list and pull in shared calendar events. Access to personal information — email, calendar, even bank details — is scoped to each individual chat, and everyone in a chat can see when someone’s information is requested. Kuyda says Wabi is SOC 2 compliant, runs entirely in the cloud, and stores most user data in the United States.
The backstory is unusually long for an AI launch. Twelve years ago, Kuyda pitched a concierge chatbot called IO on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage; her startup Luka became Replika, the AI companion company she led until last year. Wabi is free for now, the company has not settled on a business model, and Kuyda says it is in talks to raise more funding.
Why it matters
Personal AI assistants are crowding in — Meta’s Muse, Instinct and now Wabi all promise to manage your inbox, plans and goals. Wabi’s wager is that the single-thread design is the weak point: one endless conversation accumulates context until answers get buried and muddled, and it keeps the assistant a solo tool when most of life — family schedules, shared plans, household decisions — is multiplayer. If shared, app-building threads work as advertised, Wabi is less a chatbot than a shared operating layer for a household. The open questions are the usual ones: it is free with no business model yet, and an assistant that reads your email and calendar has to keep earning that trust.
Frequently asked questions
What is Wabi?
Wabi is a personal AI assistant from Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of Replika. It organises tasks and goals into separate messenger-style threads, builds small custom apps inside those threads, and lets you share threads with other people.
Is Wabi free?
Yes, for now. Wabi launched to all users on October 19, 2026 on iOS, Android and Mac, and the company says it has not yet settled on a business model.
How is Wabi different from other AI assistants?
Two ways: the agent builds the apps for you instead of asking you to create them, and threads are multiplayer — partners or family can join the same thread, with access to personal data scoped per chat and visible to everyone in it.
Sources: TechCrunch (October 19, 2026), Unite.AI