Wabi, the app from Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda, has raised $55 million at a $1.25 billion valuation. IVP led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, Forerunner and the Amazon Alexa Fund participating, alongside angels including Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, former Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Alex Pall of the Chainsmokers.
The timing is the interesting part. Only last month Wabi repositioned: from a tool for building apps with prompts to an AI messenger — "Wabi 2.0" — that acts as a personal agent and generates the interfaces you need on demand. Instead of a generic chat box, Wabi is meant to build small apps for meal planning, tracking local restaurants, planning date nights, fitness plans or specialised trivia games, and to do it for a group of people rather than one.
"Eugenia has a unique sense for where AI is headed and a track record of great taste in building it," IVP general partner Alex Lim said. Her vision, he added, goes "far beyond the text box or command line".
The valuation is a judgement about the surface, not the model. Wabi does not train a frontier model of its own; the claimed value is in distribution, in memory that spans a group of people, and in turning an intent straight into a piece of software. That is where investors are placing bets: the agent Instinct raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation in September, and Tolan, a muppet-like life companion, just took $30 million.
Scepticism is still warranted. A $1.25 billion valuation for a product that relaunched about a month ago is a promise, not a measurement. The pivot is itself an admission that the first product did not carry, and consumer agents struggle with the thing subscription numbers like to hide: retention. An app that builds apps has to prove people open it in week two — and that the generated minis are reliable rather than merely charming.
What to watch: whether Wabi makes group use the core rather than a feature; whether the minis get shared and reused; and whether the Alexa Fund's participation signals a voice or device partnership. Until then the money is real and the product is a month old.
