Investors are paying unicorn prices for a new kind of consumer AI assistant. Wabi, the startup founded by Eugenia Kuyda, who previously created the AI companion app Replika, announced on October 29 that it has raised $55 million at a valuation of $1.25 billion. IVP led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Forerunner and the Amazon Alexa Fund, plus individual backers such as Shopify's Tobi Lütke, Salesforce's Marc Benioff, former Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer, former Twitter chief Dick Costolo and musician Alex Pall. Bloomberg Law and TechCrunch both reported the same terms.
The funding follows a change of direction. Wabi first pitched itself as a way for anyone to build apps by describing them in plain language. TechCrunch reports that last month the company recast the product, in what it called Wabi 2.0, as an AI messenger in which an agent builds whatever small interface a task needs. Wabi now describes itself as a personal AI agent designed for groups rather than for one person typing into a chat window.
In practice, the agent works inside shared spaces where several people talk to it together. The company's examples include a couple keeping a running list of restaurants to try, a weekly family menu that becomes a shopping list, trivia games for a birthday and trackers for a book club. These mini-apps persist and can be edited later, so the output is more than a single chat reply. Wabi says the assistant also helps with schedules, homework, appointment bookings and trip planning. The app is available on iOS, Android and Mac, with a Windows version promised.
Wabi says the round came after strong interest in its recent public launch, but it has not disclosed user numbers, revenue or a business model, so the valuation rests largely on the product direction and its founder's record. IVP general partner Alex Lim cited Kuyda's sense of where AI is heading, and a16z's Anish Acharya said his firm has backed her since the pre-seed stage. The company says the new capital will fund product development and expansion.
The bet places Wabi in a crowded field. Bloomberg Law notes that much larger companies, including OpenAI and Meta, are competing to win consumers with their own AI assistants, and TechCrunch points out that investors are spreading wagers across several agent startups, citing Instinct's raise at a $10 billion valuation in September. Wabi's angle is that personal AI will be social: an assistant that coordinates plans and decisions among people who already know each other.
Whether that multiplayer model can hold users once general-purpose assistants add similar group features is the open question. For now, the round shows that backers are willing to price consumer agent apps at more than a billion dollars before their usage figures are public.