Replika founder raises $20M pre-seed for Wabi, the ‘YouTube of apps’ 

Replika founder raises $20M pre-seed for Wabi, the ‘YouTube of apps’ 

Eugenia Kuyda noticed the future of client AI before most. She based Replika, the first major AI companion startup, in 2017 years before ChatGPT launched. Today it has 35 million customers.  

Now Kuyda is again with a new startup called Wabi, which she describes as YouTube for apps – a social platform the place anybody can use prompts to immediately create mini apps and share them with mates. Wabi, which launched in beta last month, is a harbinger of another client AI shift: one the place personalised software turns into the norm. 

Wabi has raised $20 million in pre-seed funding from a stellar checklist of angels, including AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, Neuralink co-founder DJ Seo, and Conviction founder Sarah Guo. 

“[Kuyda] was early and right to AI companions, even though it wasn’t obvious at the time,” Anish Acharya, normal companion at Andreessen Horowitz, told TechCrunch. “It’s very rare to find someone who’s got a track record for predicting what consumers will want, and we think she’s doing it again.” 

Kuyda is coming into a scorching market. Vibe coding instruments like Cursor and Lovable have attracted vital VC curiosity, while no-code AI platforms including Emergent, Replit, and Bloom are racing to let non-technical customers build apps by prompts. Wabi’s distinction: an built-in platform for creation, discovery, and internet hosting — no app retailer required. 

Eugenia Kuyda, founding father of Wabi and ReplikaImage Credits:Wabi

“This was really made to help people who have nothing to do with coding or the tech world to very quickly create apps from their daily lives,” Kuyda, who last week joined us on stage at Disrupt to debate AI companions, told TechCrunch. “All you need to put in is ‘build me an AI therapy app,’ and that’s it. It will suggest features and you can brainstorm, but it’ll build you an app. You don’t need to be great at prompting. You never see the code.” 

Earlier this week Wabi launched sure social options to beta customers – issues like the ability to love, remark and remix any present app, in addition to test out person profiles to see what others appreciated, used, or constructed. 

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X has been blowing up about Wabi since it began dishing out invitations to pick out customers. Several founders, designers, and traders from round the world have posted about Wabi’s ease of making apps for themselves. Even Google DeepMind product lead Logan Kilpatrick gave Wabi a shout out.  

what if the app retailer was social?
with wabi, it’s.

introducing the social app retailer the place you possibly can immediately see what apps your mates are creating, loving, and remixing pic.twitter.com/tfjltyZApv

— wabi (@wabi) November 3, 2025

“We believe that the social layer is absolutely critical because it allows for so much more creativity and discovery, and these mini apps become community starters or conversation starters,” Kuyda said.  

Wabi’s Explore web page presently options current and standard apps, though Kuyda said it’s going to turn out to be more algorithmic over time. The startup plans to launch personalised onboarding in the coming weeks, mechanically producing starter apps for new customers.

Wabi’s core promise isn’t too different from ChatGPT’s GPT retailer or the bot from Quora’s Poe: Build mini apps utilizing prompts that may resolve small issues for you. Apps like Wabi have been in a position to package deal this promise effectively when it comes to prospects not having to arrange any technical infrastructure. Even in case you enter a few sentences, Wabi handles issues like creating an icon or organising databases, and deciding what the UI of the app would seem like.  

Kuyda told TechCrunch that for apps that require something to be AI-generated, customers can open the settings and select their foundational mannequin (like in the event that they wish to use ChatGPT or Gemini) and even rewrite the prompts that Wabi comes up with. 

Image Credits:TechCrunch/Wabi

Creating a basic app is simple. However, you would possibly have to debug the app to keep away from errors, which is to be anticipated in a development life cycle.  

For instance, we created an app that confirmed us a canine image every day with a canine fact. After a few days of usage, we realized the app was producing the same set of canines. When we noticed another person’s daily news app, all the dates talked about on the abstract photographs had been October 1, 2023, while the news gadgets had been a few weeks outdated. Plus, one among the sources for news was, oddly, Wikipedia. 

The onus is on the person to have an curiosity in sustaining the apps. Otherwise, you would possibly discover a number of unmanaged mini apps in the discovery part of these vibe coding apps. 

Kuyda says it’s still early days for Wabi and they’re still working out how to make sure that apps are able to go out of the box. She famous that there are still mannequin constraints that are bettering every day. She says a big chunk of the $20 million will go in direction of constructing out Wabi’s product team. 

Part of the funds are also going in direction of successfully subsidizing use of Wabi until the startup figures out a monetization mannequin. Kuyda says she’s not enthusiastic about internet hosting adverts on the platform, which results in incentives that create darkish patterns. 

“I built Replika and never had any ads,” she said. “I think ads just create a pretty bad user experience. I like creating delightful user experiences.” 

Image Credits:TechCrunch/Wabi

Acharya believes as soon as the network effects take off, will probably be straightforward to monetize. He sees a future the place there’s a professionalization factor that will occur on the platform, the place many of the youngsters today who wish to be TikTok stars would possibly instead make software on Wabi.  

“You think about the history of YouTube, it started out as people putting these shaky, low budget content experiences,” he said. “Now, 20 years later, it’s super high production value.” 

Acharya added that with there’s even more alternative with software because “video content has decaying value over time,” he said. “Software has compounding value.” If anyone builds the next hit app, it’ll continue to be related over the course of time.

The thought matches neatly into Acharya’s thesis on the future of “disposable software” — small, versatile apps that people can create and discard as simply as opening a new tab or having a fast chat with ChatGPT. 

“I think software is the final frontier of participation,” Acharya said. “The internet has been this driving force for participation…where anyone can post their thoughts. It’s kind of strange that the internet is obviously all software, yet so few people have been able to make it.” 

So what does a Web 3.0 seem like when everybody can build and share software within a few minutes? 

“It feels like the internet has gotten sort of clinical – we’re all using the same Instagram, the same TikTok, we all have the same home screens, apps have gotten pretty monotone,” he said. “I think the opportunity with Wabi is it’s going to restore some of that punk, strange, early 90s web ethos.” 

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