Replika Founder's Wabi Becomes a Unicorn Ten Days After Launch, Raising $55 Million at $1.25 Billion

Wabi, the AI assistant startup founded by Replika creator Eugenia Kuyda, has raised $55 million at a $1.25 billion valuation — a round that landed just ten days after the product opened to all users. IVP led the financing, according to Bloomberg and TechCrunch, with Andreessen Horowitz, Forerunner and the Amazon Alexa Fund joining, alongside angel investors including Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, former Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer and former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

The speed is the headline: a consumer AI product crossing the billion-dollar line in under two weeks from general availability is rare even by 2026 standards, and it reflects how quickly capital is moving toward "agentic" consumer experiences after a stretch in which investor attention was locked on infrastructure.

Wabi's product thesis is that the chat group, not the solo chatbot window, is where AI assistants belong. The app drops an agent and user-built mini-apps into group chats, where they coordinate real-world logistics — planning a date night, picking a restaurant, tracking a group trip, or organizing meals. Kuyda launched Wabi 2.0, which organizes work into separate agentic threads that can be shared like group chats, to all users on October 20, as this site reported at the time. The new funding confirms the commercial momentum behind that launch.

Kuyda is best known for Replika, the AI companion app that attracted tens of millions of users and no small amount of controversy over its emotional intimacy features. Wabi is a deliberate pivot from one-on-one companionship to group logistics — a market that overlaps with Meta's and Tencent's work on agentic messaging, both of which have been pushing assistants into their own chat products.

The investor list is a who's-who of consumer and enterprise platform builders, and their presence is strategic: Lutke's Shopify and Amazon's Alexa fund both sit at the intersection of chat and commerce, where a group-chat agent that can coordinate a dinner could eventually book the restaurant, order the groceries or split the bill. Whether Wabi can hold user attention beyond novelty is the open question — consumer AI assistants have a habit of spiking and fading — but the round gives Kuyda a long runway to find out.

For the broader market, Wabi is another sign that the agent race is moving from enterprise back offices into group chats, where distribution is everything and incumbents — Meta, Tencent, ByteDance — own the venue. A startup raising at $1.25 billion to build inside other people's chat networks is either early to a new consumer category or building on rented land. The round's angels, notably, include people who own a lot of that land.