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Meet Wabi, the AI assistant with group chats, multiple threads, and an app-builder | Equity podcast

It seems like every big AI player is building a personal agent. Meta has Muse, OpenAI launched Dots, and a startup called Instinct recently raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. But Eugenia Kuyda thinks the next generation of AI assistants needs to do more than book your restaurant reservations and find you hidden…

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It seems like every big AI player is building a personal agent. Meta has Muse, OpenAI launched Dots, and a startup called Instinct recently raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. But Eugenia Kuyda thinks the next generation of AI assistants needs to do more than book your restaurant reservations and find you hidden money in your Gmail.

Kuyda, who founded AI companion app Replika, has just launched Wabi, a personal AI agent that organizes your life into separate conversations, brings other people into the mix, and builds custom apps around what you’re trying to do. The idea is to make AI less of a solo productivity tool and more of a way to spend time with the people who matter to you.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Kuyda about why she thinks AI agents should bring people together instead of keeping them glued to a single chatbot, how Wabi plans to compete in a crowded and expensive market, and what it takes to get people comfortable giving an AI access to their email.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

1:11 Meet Wabi

5:33 From “YouTube for apps” to a proactive personal agent

7:12 Why AI should bring people together, not just save time

10:17 Multi-thread chats vs. everything in one conversation

13:33 Shared permissions: who sees what inside a chat

14:57 Phones, hardware, and the “MS-DOS era” of AI interfaces

17:39 Funding, compute costs, and the free-for-now business model

24:10 Handing over your Gmail: how Wabi earns trust

28:02 Outro

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2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. @patekreol974

    October 22, 2026 at 10:09 am

    Super

    Reply

  2. @DD-tm6ij

    October 22, 2026 at 10:52 am

    Ty for pushing on the data privacy concerns. Wabi seems like a pure black box and the answers here didn’t help on that front.

    Reply

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