Eugenia Kuyda was the first to see the future of consumer AI. He founded Replika, the first major AI companion startup, in 2017, several years before ChatGPT launched. Today it has 35 million users.
Now Kuyda is back with a new startup called Waabi, which she describes as the YouTube for 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 consumer AI shift: one where personalized software becomes the norm.
Wabi has raised $20 million in pre-seed funding from an impressive list of angels including AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, Replit CEO Amjad Massad, Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, Neuralink co-founder DJ Seo, and Conviction founder Sarah Guo.
“[Quida]was early and right for AI peers, even if it wasn’t obvious at the time,” Anish Acharya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told TechCrunch. “It’s very rare to find someone who has a track record of anticipating what consumers want, and we think she’s doing it again.”
Kuida is entering a hot market. Vibe coding tools like Cursor and Lovable have attracted significant VC interest, while no-code AI platforms including Emergent, Replit, and Bloom are racing to allow non-technical users to build apps through prompts. The Wabi difference: A unified platform for building, discovery, and hosting – no app store required.
“It was really created to help people who have no connection to the coding or tech world to build very quickly apps from their daily lives,” Kuyda, who joined us on Disrupt’s stage last week to discuss AI Companions, told TechCrunch. “All you have to do is say ‘build an AI therapy app for me,’ and that’s it. It’ll suggest features and you can brainstorm, but it’ll build an app for you. You don’t need to be great at prompting. You never see the code.”
Earlier this week Waabi released some social features to beta users – such as the ability to like, comment on and remix any existing app, as well as checking user profiles to see what others have liked, used or created.
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X has been spreading the word about Wabi ever since it started sending out invitations to select users. many Founders, designer, And investors from all around World to pass Posted by Wabi about the ease of creating apps for yourself. Even Google DeepMind Product Lead logan kilpatrick shout out wabby,
“We believe the social layer is absolutely critical because it allows for a lot of creativity and discovery, and these mini apps become community starters or conversation starters,” Kuyda said.
Waabi’s Explore page currently includes recent and popular apps, although Kuyada said it will become more algorithmic over time. The startup plans to launch personalized onboarding in the coming weeks, which will automatically create a starter app for new users.
Waabi’s main promise isn’t much different from ChatGPT’s GPT store or Quora’s Poe’s bot: Build mini apps using prompts that can solve small problems for you. Apps like Waabi are able to deliver on this promise well by not requiring customers to set up any technical infrastructure. Even if you enter a few sentences, Wabi handles things like creating an icon or setting up the database and deciding how the app’s UI will look.
Kuyada told TechCrunch that for apps that need to be AI-generated, users can open Settings and choose their default model (like if they want to use ChatGPT or Gemini) and even rewrite the prompts that come with Waabi.
Creating a basic app is simple. However, you may need to debug the app to avoid errors, which is to be expected in the development life cycle.
For example, we created an app that showed us a picture of a dog every day along with a dog fact. After a few days of use, we realized that the app was producing the same set of dogs. When we looked at another user’s Daily News app, all the dates mentioned on the summary photos were October 1, 2023, while the news items were a few weeks old. Also, one of the sources of the news, oddly enough, was Wikipedia.
The onus is on the user to take an interest in maintaining the apps. Otherwise, you may find a lot of unmanaged mini apps in the search section of these vibe coding apps.
Kuyda says it’s still early days for Waabi and they’re still working on how to make sure the apps are ready to go out of the box. He said there are still model constraints which are being improved every day. She says a large portion of the $20 million will be spent building Waabi’s product team.
A portion of the funds are also going toward effectively subsidizing the use of Waabi until the startup figures out a monetization model. Kuida says he has no interest in hosting ads on the platform, creating incentives that create dark patterns.
“I made the replica and never did any advertising,” he said. “I think ads create a very bad user experience. I like creating enjoyable user experiences.”
Acharya believes that once the network effect kicks in, it will become easier to make money. He sees a future where there will be a commercialization element to the platform, where many of today’s kids who want to become TikTok stars can create software on Wabi instead.
“You think about the history of YouTube, it started when people were putting out this shaky, low-budget content experience,” he said. “Now, 20 years later, it has extremely high production values.”
Acharya said there are even more opportunities with software because “the value of video content is diminishing over time,” he said. “Software has compound value.” If someone creates the next hit app, it will remain relevant over time.
This idea fits well into Acharya’s thesis on the future of “disposable software” – small, flexible apps that people can create and discard as easily as opening a new tab or having a quick chat with ChatGPIT.
“I think software is the final frontier of participation,” Acharya said. “The Internet has been the driving force for participation…where anyone can post their ideas. It’s strange that the Internet is apparently all software, yet very few people are able to create it.”
So what does Web 3.0 look like when everyone can create and share software in a matter of minutes?
“It feels like the internet has become clinical in a way – we’re all using the same Instagram, the same TikTok, we all have the same home screen, apps have become quite monotone,” he said. “I think the opportunity with Waabee is that it’s going to restore some of the punk, weird, web ethos of the early ’90s.”
