Meta and Instinct are racing to build your AI assistant. Wabi has a different idea.

0:00This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech. Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Balan and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. As regular listeners will know by now, it seems like every big AI player is coming out with a personal agent. Meta has Muse, OpenAI has Dots, and a startup called Instinct just raised$1 billion at a$10 billion valuation. and more are coming out every day. Today's guest, Eugenia Kuda, thinks those personal AI agents are missing a few important pieces, like multiple threads, shared chats, and an app builder.

0:40Eugenia founded Replica, one of the first AI companion apps, and now runs Wabi, which earlier this week launched a personal agent that builds the interface you need in the moment.

0:55Eugenia, welcome to the show.

0:56Eugenia Kuyda: Thank you so much, Rebecca, for inviting me. So Wabi has officially launched the next evolution of Wabi because you launched last year and now you've got what I'm calling privately Wabi 2.0. And this is coming into the space to play with the personal AI agents, AI assistants. Can you walk us through what you launched this week? So what we're launching today is an app that allows you to talk to an agent that can do anything for you from booking flights to figuring out your elementary school tours for kids to organizing any family logistics or logistics in your life that you have. And the difference from some other agents that launched recently is that you can do that easily with other people in your life.

1:45Eugenia Kuyda: So the way Wabi works, it's an app that looks like a messenger app basically, where you can text Wabi and you connect your Gmail account and Wabi will proactively start getting stuff done for you and organize it by different threads. and any thread, you can invite people that are relevant for that. So to give you an example, for me, I have kids. So we have a kids thread with my husband, me, our nanny, my mom, and basically Wabi helps us organize everything around our kids. And on top of that makes mini apps so that we can see everything in one place. So for example, for our kids thread, we have an app that recommends were to take them to in a South Bay area, like all the cool little events for three and five-year-olds.

2:35Eugenia Kuyda: We have an app that pulls a preschool menu every day for us to see what they're eating and a couple other ones. Yeah, I mean, I want to get more into some of the use cases because I think that everyone's doing it slightly differently, but I haven't seen anyone do exactly what Wabi is doing insofar as it could be multiplayer and you have this kind of app function. But before we do that, you know, we just came off the back of Disrupt at the time of this recording. It was another banger year. Congratulations. Thank you. You originally, I mean, you've been a guest on our stage a number of times last year as well.

3:08You came to talk about AI chatbot companions because of your other startup replica. But you pitched 12 years ago an AI concierge, right, to help you do some of this agentic stuff. Can you talk a little bit about how you got from that to what is now Wabi?

3:25Eugenia Kuyda: Yeah, so exactly 12 years ago, 2014, October 19th, crazy was exactly this day. I was on this on stage for TechCrunch Distra Battlefield, presenting a company that was then called or product that was then called IO, then eventually pivoted into Replica. But back then, the vision was really close to what we're doing right now with Wabi. It was really a messenger app, just like what we have right now, where we were texting with an agent that could help you basically deal with anything you have in your life. The first demo was restaurant reservations and recommendations, but we kind of showed the vision behind it.

4:07Eugenia Kuyda: We showed the video that I shared actually on Twitter a little bit earlier, and it was basically the same thing as Wabi. It was basically a messenger with agents and friends. So you can talk to anyone you know there, and you could at any point tag an agent that would help you find a show to go to, or book a restaurant reservation or book a trip. We built it back then without language models, which was really interesting because they didn't really exist. So deep learning applied to dialogue generation like the first paper on that came out in 2015. So we had to build everything with rule-based conversational engines that we've built, classifiers, some machine learning, but not end-to-end language models.

4:49Eugenia Kuyda: And interestingly, it worked pretty well. I mean, it didn't work as well as today, of course, but it's kind of interesting to see how we ended up realizing the same vision we shared at TechCrunch Disrupt 12 years ago. Beautiful poetry just coming full circle. And now the tech has finally caught up. I mean, Wabi, you know, when you launched last year, I believe TechCrunch had the exclusive on that as well as your 20 million pre-seed. You had, you know, angels like Gary Tan, Sarah Guo, Amjad Massad, who's the CEO of Replit, who was also on our stage at Disrupt just a few days ago. Now, this was a it was a slightly different app, right?

5:25It was more like a YouTube for apps, kind of a social media platform. Anyone can prompt many apps into existence and then share them or remix them. What made you pivot in a way or evolve into something that's more of a personal assistant?

5:39Eugenia Kuyda: We started this company with the idea of building a better interface, a rich interface for AI and to bring personal software to people that could help you deal with every aspect of your daily life. And so our first iteration, the first iteration of our product was an app where you could make any app, we could build any app. And what we learned is that even although people love personal software, they don't necessarily always want to build it. And it's pretty hard to help them discover other people's software. And so the evolution of Wabi is basically an agent that still builds your personal software, but also does a lot more on top of that.

6:19Eugenia Kuyda: And most importantly, you don't have to think about what app to build. The agent, by knowing you so deeply and understanding exactly what you're trying to get done, will build an app that you need. And you can always change it or prompt it or build another app, but you don't have to. And I think that's the main difference is that amount of productivity that we've put into it with this evolution of the app. You actually had to share your launch day with a couple of other companies. Tolan, they got$30 million for their AI companion that helps users navigate life is the way one of our reporters described it.

6:52And an AI assistant town as well also has hit a unicorn evaluation just four months after launch. So, you know, there's the apps that make it different. Maybe walk us through a little bit about what that looks like, because you showed me a demo. And one thing I thought was really cool, like you showed me your you and your partner's chat. And then across the top of the chat, there was the different apps that related to, you know, your life and like what you two might want to talk about or whatever long term goals you might be setting. I think what's interesting about Wabi is that we're trying to shift away from, or not away, but basically build an agent that's not just focused on productivity.

7:28Eugenia Kuyda: Obviously, productivity is very important. Getting stuff done is super important. And we do that for sure. Wabi is actually fantastic for that because it doesn't even ask you for inputs when you sign up. It starts working for you from the get-go. But I think one of the bigger insights that we had over time, especially after having built Replica, is that most people actually don't care that much about saving time. I mean, it's nice, but a lot of people really want to spend, you know, are looking to spend time, spend quality time, figure, you know, do things. How to spend the time you have well.

8:03Eugenia Kuyda: How to spend the time you have well. And look at the most popular apps, obviously, TikTok and Instagram. They're not there to save anyone's time. And so to us, AI shouldn't just be about saving time. It should help people spend it better, doing more of what they love with people they love. we believe that AI agents should bring people together, not give people more reasons to spend time alone with AI. And what I saw that, you know, over and over again, like people are launching these AI products that are really focused on the single player experience. If you just have text in your agents, the pitch that we keep hearing is, oh, now you have your agent, you don't need to talk to anyone else.

8:41Eugenia Kuyda: My agent will just talk to your agent. And to us, that it feels wrong because why would these AIs make us even more disconnected? So that was kind of the main reason to build Wabi is to make something that's really focused not just on productivity, but also on long-term goals you might have, like losing weight, learning something that will help you feel inspired and discover some new stuff, whether it's a music show you want to see or a fun trip you want to take, but also just basically helping you engage with other people in a different way, maybe like help you feel more connected to other people.

9:22Eugenia Kuyda: My Wabi, for example, tells me if I haven't reached out to a friend for a while and suggests what to say, I showed you today, but we have a chat with my boyfriend where we have a few apps that Wabi built for us. And one is all the music shows that we want to go to. One is a bookshelf, a shared bookshelf where we put all the books that we're reading. We read a lot together. Once we want to read, once we're, you know, and Wabi suggests some other ones we might like. Did you guys both come up with those apps yourself? Did you decide like, oh, these are the apps we want? Or is that something that the agent decided?

9:58Or is that something you guys were like, this would be fun?

10:00Eugenia Kuyda: Mostly it's either us saying what we want to achieve. So more talking about the goal and not the app itself. or why are we just looking into our shared accounts and saying, hey, like you, seems like you guys are going on this trip. I made you a little widget to keep track of everything or it seems like you have a lot of things on your calendar that might be interesting to each other. I made a shared calendar for you. Every company today is looking for an edge, better insights, faster decisions, greater resilience. But as AI drives new growth, it also creates new demands on energy and infrastructure.

10:34Schneider Electric is connecting energy, automation, and digital technologies to help organizations make smarter decisions and operate more efficiently. Because the future won't be shaped by AI alone, it will be shaped by energy and industrial intelligence. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech. Yeah, cool. Okay, so you can do, you know, these group chats, you can do singular chats based on different ones. Like you showed me that you have like a health chat, and then that has its own health apps for checking your workouts, tracking, you know, your diet and things like that. And so I think the multi-thread is a really interesting design choice because, you know, I've been testing out Muse, for example, and Muse is everything's in one chat, you know, even the long-term goals, you know, whether it's productivity or long-term goal setting, it's all in one chat.

11:18And I'm curious why companies would choose to do that if it was like a deliberate design choice or if it's, you know, because it's maybe prohibitive or difficult to do the multi-thread. What do you think?

11:31Eugenia Kuyda: I think it's a design choice. I clearly Instinct wanted to do that all in just iMessages. So a single thread makes sense because it is not possible for one contact to start different threads in iMessages. What are the downsides? I think the downsides are pretty significant. Actually, if you think about a single-threaded experience, it gets worse over time. So in the beginning, it's easy. You don't have necessarily to think about it. You just start with one. But what I found with most of these agents is that But after a while, as I've been using them, the experience starts to get worse. Now everything is in one thread.

12:05Eugenia Kuyda: I started maybe like 15 different tasks. And for me to see, and in order to like actually understand what's going on, I need to constantly scroll and read and try to like, you know, fish this information from in this one, in the history of that one chat. And I think it also closes the door on productivity, at it broadly because yes, you can be proactive about certain things, but if you only have one single thread, you should be very selective in terms of what you're actually going to send to that thread. And so for Wabi, for example, we have a bunch of different things that we want to maybe reach out to you about.

12:42Eugenia Kuyda: Maybe there's a cool music show that you want to see. Maybe there's a new restaurant that opened that you might be interested in. Maybe there's something, maybe there's a birthday coming up for one of your friends and we might recommend you get. If all of that was going into one thread, that would not be a great experience. And because we start threads for all important parts of your life, then all the notifications go to actually, all those messages go to a specific thread, and then it seems much more organized and much more manageable. Yeah. And then I also wonder if you think this is a concern.

13:12You know, I've talked to a lot of researchers about what happens when the context window gets longer. And, you know, typically the longer the conversation, the more that guardrails will break down. And also there's more chance of hallucination. I don't know if anyone's reporting this with instinct or muse yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if that ended up happening down the line.

13:32Eugenia Kuyda: That actually is also a problem. Of course, having things more organized allows us on the back end as well to understand better. Like, okay, well, this is related to your kid's stuff and this is related to your health stuff. So, you know, things are not being mixed up and, you know, it's easier for us to follow the context. And then the threads share context. So we do understand, you know, in between each other. So if we need to pull some context from another thread, we can. But it definitely allows for a much more organized way of looking at things, both from the user perspective, but also from the tech side.

14:06And one other thing I want to bring up about the threads that you share with people. So you are able to provide access to your calendar, your email, your bank account, etc. And that's not just for you. That's also what others can potentially access, but only within the chat. Can you explain why that's significant? can.

14:26Eugenia Kuyda: So one of the interesting design decisions we made, product decisions, was to allow people to share permissions inside a particular chat. So for example, if you're talking to a boyfriend, you probably want to share your partner, you probably want to share a lot. So for that chat, for example, I give full permission for the agent to access anything. So if he wants to ask in that chat, again, he can do it separately, but in that chat, he can ask things like, when's Eugene, you're free next week, or if she bought tickets for that trip we were talking about, and so on, so on, so on. And some other chats, I only give access to, you know, some connectors, like for example, just to my memory and my calendar.

15:07Eugenia Kuyda: So it really depends. But I think this idea that you don't give permissions, you know, to everyone, but you give permissions to different chats and you can see because you're also in that chat. So if someone asks some information about you, you always see what actually is being asked and what Wabi responds. I think that's a really cool way to solve for shared context without necessarily breaking user trust. You're obviously coming into a space that's getting increasingly more crowded. I wanted to ask you about what you thought about the hardware angle of it all. So, you know, Meta earlier this month introduced Muse Gadgets.

15:42That's an open source project that lets developers build their own hardware that connects to Muse. Like, do you think that hardware will be an important piece of the AI interface going forward? Or do you think like just being on our phones is it for the near future?

16:01Eugenia Kuyda: I think the phone is really powerful. It's very hard to replace that. However, I do think that our phones need to become a lot more AI first. So to say that the operating system right now on our phones is really not matching the current AI error. Like if you think about my home screen on my iPhone, it's still, you know, like 300 apps from the app store. And 90 % of those, I forgot what they even are. I don't even know what they do anymore, nor do I use them. And so I just think there's something wrong with that paradigm. I think we'll have, we'll still, our main way to access things will be a phone.

16:38Eugenia Kuyda: It's just going to need to become a lot more AI first, AI native. Whatever the operating system on it should look a lot more like Wabi in my view. There should be apps that are generated on the fly for you by an agent that knows you well. Everything should be a lot more social and multiplayer, again, just like Wabi. And probably the idea of downloading apps off the app store is the main way to access software. It's probably not going to be the most prevalent way. in the future. But I'm not necessarily a believer that we'll buy new gadgets to access agents. The phone seems to be a perfectly fine way to do that.

17:20Yeah. Well, clearly it's fine for a lot of people. I mean, I think Muse has already had 2.8 million installs as of late September, close to 700 ,000 US daily actives in terms of estimates. I don't think we have Instincts numbers yet. And hopefully you'll share lobbies with us soon. But this is yeah, this is a competitive space. I mean, we're talking Instinct. They raised recently, you know, one billion dollar Series C at a 10 billion dollar valuation. Wabi raised 20 million last year. I know you said that you're in talks to raise again. You know, you've just opened this up, not invite only. This is everyone can download it if they want to.

17:59Right. So I can imagine that's a lot of compute. Like that's a pretty expensive um task to keep this running like how close are you to new funding or like how are you keeping costs down well we're definitely getting a lot of um inbound interests

18:15Eugenia Kuyda: um and right now the you know the focus is on making um also dropping the cost uh more significantly without uh without decreasing quality at all uh we do have some of the best engineers working on this. You have a 15-person team, and I would probably say it's the best team in consumer AI that you can find right now in this market. So hopefully we can provide a much better experience, but also at a lower cost to some of these other companies. And in terms of monetization, you don't have a strategy for that yet? For now, it's free. And I think we want to keep it free for a little bit, for a while.

18:51Free usually means ads or data or something, right?

18:55Eugenia Kuyda: For now, we're keeping it free. It's probably going to become freemium at some point, but it's not necessarily, it doesn't necessarily have to be. Ads, so for example, Instinct mentioned that they want to go the kind of, they want to stay free, but they want to maybe take a fee from each transaction. I think the playbook yet for agents hasn't been kind of defined. So I think we're all thinking about a few different options and we'll try a few different things. There's other companies we talked about on the show a couple of weeks ago, Tab, Underdog, I can't remember which one said that they wanted to do a take rate for each transaction.

19:29But I think Sean made the point, one of our reporters, that that might change the incentive structure for the company. Right. Like, might they start, you know, suggesting that you purchase more things just so that they can facilitate more transactions? And like, what if someone doesn't even want to use it for transactions? Right. Like half the stuff that you described has nothing to do with transactions. I agree.

19:53Eugenia Kuyda: And I think the interesting part, the interesting point for Wabi is that not every interaction is actually inference and compute heavy. If you're talking to any of these agents, big agents you mentioned, you're just talking to, you're always burning computer. You're always asking them to do something for you. Whereas in Wabi, we're seeing people talking to each other because they're group chats. We're seeing people using apps. And when you use an app on Wabi, it's almost always doesn't require much of a computer at all. So for example, if in my health thread, I'm tracking my weight with Wabi, I'm tracking my weightlifting.

20:30Eugenia Kuyda: None of that is really computer-heavy because I'm not sending Wabi on these complicated, complex agent tasks. So I think that's the interesting case for Wabi is that like not everything, every interaction is the super heavy multi-step task. That requires a ton of reasoning. Exactly. I'm talking to a bunch of users on Wabi and, you know, my family and all that. So a lot of those interactions are free for us. And I do believe in that a lot. I think we will see more and more of these use cases on Wabi, especially the more people join. So you have more of your network that you can talk to. You know, that reminds me of something that Amjad Massad from Replit said on stage last week.

21:14He was talking about and a few people have mentioned this to me, that a lot of software development, especially like, you know, disposable software, personal software development is actually, you know, using LLMs to build non-deterministic or deterministic software. Right. So, you know, you're using it to build an app, but that app isn't like powered by an LLM. It's just a normal app. Right. Rules based, et cetera. And so it actually doesn't necessarily need to use as much compute as you were saying.

21:45Eugenia Kuyda: Yes, for sure. And I do think that apps are critical. Like if you think about it right now, you have, you know, your apps on your phone are separate from your agents or your AI, whether it's your cloud or whatever. And then separate from, you know, your messenger apps where you coordinate with other people. I do think that that all needs to be part of the same app, just like what we're doing with Wavi, where it's your group chat. You can message other people, your agent, your AI is right there with you, and it makes your apps so your apps are also right there with you. And I think those apps are pretty critical because not everything can be done just through text or even if it could or even if you can do it, it's just not very convenient.

22:24Eugenia Kuyda: I do think that, you know, we've always talked about currently we're in this Microsoft DOS era of AI interfaces and there will be a macOS Windows, so to say, for everyone to use. And it's going to feel completely archaic that everything just happened in these single thread chat chats. It already does. Absolutely. And I do feel there's just so much to that cannot be done in chat. Well, at least like you can't really just discovery is very limited. all sorts of repeating use cases that just don't work very well. Like again, like for example, if you think about some of the things I'm doing with Wabi is, you know, tracking my weight daily.

23:02Eugenia Kuyda: How would I do that? Or tracking calories. How would I do that with instinct? Like, obviously I can just send it like, okay, this is what, you know, what I saw today on my scale and this is what I'm eating. But then how am I going to like, how am I going to find out? Like, for example, how much did I weigh? Like last week, I need to ask it each time or how many calories have I consumed today? it gets just stupid, what am I gonna every time ask what's the total after each time I log something? And these are just the simplest use cases that, you know, technically you could probably figure some way out to do that just in text, but it's just so inconvenient.

23:36Eugenia Kuyda: Again, it's just like using your computer through a terminal. It's just not convenient at all. And I do think it makes a lot of these use cases almost inaccessible for most users. So if you think about it, I do think right now there's just such a big spread between the early adopters that do know how to create really complex workflows with AI and a regular consumer that still uses AI and ChagipT for search and this general kind of question as a question answering service and don't really know how to tackle these other aspects of life. yeah so i do think that with wabi what we're trying to do is to really show how this magical agentic experience can be brought to everyone and not just for the backlog of your tedious tasks but for all aspects of life whether it's helping you grow as a partner or connect better with you know your friends then um your friends or your network or anything like that now okay so you you had sent me, you know, late last week, you sent me a link to try out the app.

24:50And the first thing I had to do was connect my email. And that was like a like, I feel like a lot of people who really want to try some of these apps to get the most out of them. These, you know, personal agents really still feel uncomfortable about connecting their personal information, their emails, like letting a company read all of their emails? How do you make people feel safe?

25:15Eugenia Kuyda: So we started with making people basically as part of like the onboarding, sign up their Gmail and let us read through it just mostly to create, to be able to create a really good experience. I do feel we have a pretty magical first time experience where we pre-create a bunch of threads for you based on what we learn about you. Do I have like 20 years of my Gmail just like somewhere on a cloud that you guys are paying for? Is that what happens? No, we just we just look through it to come up with these topics. We don't store it anywhere. But right now we're working on a new version. The next update, you'll be able to skip it and kind of join Wabi without giving access to that.

25:56Eugenia Kuyda: I mean, the caveat is, of course, in my view, is slightly less great experience because you have to basically tell us what you want for Wavi to work on. But I do like, in the end of the day, the more data you connect, Wavi can just be a better assistant to you, a better agent, because we bet a lot on that proactivity element. But in order to be truly proactive, we need some of that context. Okay. So then let's say I give you, you know, the connectors are all the specific APIs of each company, right? So if you're connecting your finances via Plaid, that's Plaid's connector, it's Gmail's connector it's you know you're trusting the connectors essentially from these larger companies these bigger enterprises to know that that's a secure connection.

26:41Eugenia Kuyda: Yes correct so you know we're really working with you know all the bigger companies and APIs to to do that to bring that experience. In terms of like data storage data collection this is you know a lot of people's extremely personal info right like their you know medical information sometimes their kids information. What would be a red flag for you in another company? Let's say you weren't doing WAPI. What would be another, what would be a red flag for you in terms of not feeling safe to make those connections? I think there's a ton of, there's definitely, you know, a ton of stuff to look out for.

27:13Eugenia Kuyda: But I do think that, you know, you probably want to make sure that that is a legitimate startup. That's not a one person kind of bipodic thing, you know, that maybe has some funding, some bigger backers behind them. For us, I think that, you know, I built a company called Replica before, which was the first AI companion, and people were sharing very personal information with us. They were, you know, they've been having conversations with Replica that, you know, we would know things that no other service, even today's AI agents, you know, would never learn all the things that people would tell their Replica.

27:48Eugenia Kuyda: And, you know, knock on wood, we had with, you know, over 40 million users, we had no um not one accident actual incident with any of that data going anywhere we made it from commitment to our users from the very beginning with replica that we will never sell their data we're never not never going to monetize their data never share it with third party and um you know we we kept our promise on that front and also in terms of security so i think we have pretty good track record and you know we're making the same promise uh here with wabi i do think that That trust is absolutely critical with your users at the end of the day and trusting you with all this information.

28:29Eugenia Kuyda: But I think we're definitely building something that people can trust. Well, that's about all the time we have today. Thank you, Eugenia, for joining us, talking about positioning for Wabi and what you think about AI agents in general. Thanks for coming on the show. Is there anywhere that our listeners can connect with you online? Yes, of course. Probably on X, E-K-U-Y-D-A is my handle. DM me. My DMs are open. I'm happy to walk you through the app. But ideally, of course, just download Wabi and find me on Wabi. My handle is Eugenia and text me anytime. Great. Well, thanks again. Our listeners, you can find me on X on LinkedIn.

29:11You can find Equity on X on Threads at EquityPod. Talk to you next time. equity is hosted by tech crunch senior reporters and produced by theresa loconsolo with editing by cal subscribe on youtube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com slash events thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time