Meta and Instinct are racing to build your AI assistant. Wabi has a different idea.

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. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Kuyda thinks single-threaded AI chats get worse as you use them, and how separate threads improve the user experience. How Wabi is approaching compute costs and monetization while its app is free. Whether phones will remain the primary way people access AI, even as operating systems become more AI-first. What Kuyda looks for when deciding whether an AI startup deserves users' trust. Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

• 0:05Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Ballon and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. As regular listeners will know by now, it seems like every big AI player is coming out with a personal agent. Meta has Muse, OpenAI has Dots, and a startup called Instinct just raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. And more are coming out every day. Today's guest, Eugenia Kuda, thinks those personal AI agents are missing a few important pieces, like multiple threads, shared chats, and an app builder. Eugenia founded Replica, one of the first AI companion apps, and now runs Wabi, which earlier this week launched a personal agent that builds the interface you need in the moment.

• 0:55Rebecca Bellan?

  Eugenia, welcome to the show.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Rebecca, for inviting me.

• 0:58Rebecca Bellan?

  So, Wabi has officially launched the next evolution of Wabi, because you launched last year, and now you've got what I'm calling privately Wabi 2.0. And this is coming into the space to play with the personal AI agents, AI assistants. Can you walk us through what you launched this week?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  So what we're launching today is an app that allows you to talk to an agent that can do anything for you, from booking flights to figuring out your elementary school tours for kids, to organizing any family logistics or your logistics in your life that you have. And the difference from some other agents that launched recently is that you can do that easily with other people in your life. So the way Wabi works, it's an app that looks like a messenger app, basically, where you can text Wabi, and Wabi will, you connect your Gmail account, and Wabi will proactively start getting stuff done for you and organize it by different threads.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  And any thread, you can invite people that are relevant for that. So to give you an example, for me, I have kids, so we have a kids thread with my husband, me, our nanny, my mom, and basically, Wabi helps us organize everything around our kids and on top of that makes mini apps so that we can see everything in one place. So for example, for our kids thread, we have an app that recommends where to take them to in a South Bay area, like all the cool little events for three and five-year-olds. We have an app that pulls a preschool menu every day for us to see what they're eating and a couple of other ones.

• 2:43Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, I want to get more into some of the use cases because I think that everyone's doing it slightly differently, but I haven't seen anyone do exactly what Wabi is doing insofar as it could be multiplayer and you have this kind of app function. But before we do that, you know, we just came off the back of Disrupt at the time of this recording. It was another banger year.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Congratulations.

• 3:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Thank you. You originally, I mean, you've been a guest on our stage a number of times last year as well. You came to talk about AI chatbot companions because of your other startup, Replica. But you pitched 12 years ago, an AI concierge, right, to help you do some of this agentic stuff. Can you talk a little bit about how you got from that to what is now Wabi?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so exactly 12 years ago, 2014, October 19th, crazy, it was exactly this day, I was on this, onstage for TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, presenting a company that was then called, or a product that was then called I/O, then eventually pivoted into Replica. But back then, the vision was really close to what we're doing right now with Wabi. It was really a messenger app, just like what we have right now, where you were texting with an agent that would, that could help you basically deal with anything you have in your life. The first demo was restaurant reservations and recommendations, but we kind of showed the, you know, the vision behind it. We showed the video that I shared actually on Twitter a little bit earlier, and it was

• 4:11Speaker 02

  basically the same thing as Wabi. It was basically a messenger with agents and friends. So you could talk to anyone you know there, and you could at any point tag an agent that would help you find a show to go to, or book a restaurant reservation, or book a trip. We built it back then without language models, which was really interesting because they didn't really exist. So deep learning applied to dialogue generation like that. The first paper on that came out in 2015. So we had to build, had to build everything with rule-based conversational engines that we've built, classifiers, some machine learning, but not, not, you know, end-to-end language models. And interestingly, worked pretty well. I mean, it didn't work as well as today, of course, but it's kind of interesting to

• 4:56Speaker 02

  see how we ended up realizing the same vision we shared at TechCrunch Disrupt 12 years ago.

• 5:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Beautiful poetry, just coming full circle. And now the tech has finally caught up. I mean, Wabi, you know, when you launched last year, I believe TechCrunch had the exclusive on that, as well as your 20 million pre-seed. You had, you know, angels like Gary Tan, Sarah Guo, Amjad Masad, who's the CEO of Repli, who was also on our stage at Disrupt just a few days ago. Now, this was a, it was a slightly different app, right? It was more like a YouTube for apps, kind of a social media platform. Anyone can prompt many apps into existence and then share them or remix them. What made you pivot in a way or evolve into something that's more of a personal assistant?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  We started this company with the idea of building a better interface, a rich interface for AI, and, you know, to bring personal software to people that could be, that could help you deal with every aspect of your daily life.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  And so our first iteration, the first iteration of our product was an app where you could make any app, we could build any app. And what we launched is that even although people love personal software, they don't necessarily always want to build it, and it's pretty hard to help them discover other people's software. And so the evolution of Wabi is basically an agent that still builds your personal software, but also does a lot more on top of that. And most importantly, you don't have to think about what app to build. The agent, by knowing you so deeply and understanding exactly what you're trying to get done, will build an app that you need. And you can always change it or prompt it or build another app, but you don't have to. And I think that's the main difference is that amount of productivity that we've put

• 6:37Speaker 02

  into it with this, with this evolution of the app.

• 6:41Rebecca Bellan?

  You actually had to share your launch day with a couple of other companies. Tolan, they got 30 million for their AI companion that helped users navigate life, is the way one of our reporters described it. And an AI assistant, Town, as well, also has hit a unicorn valuation just four months after launch. So, you know, there's the apps that make it different. Maybe walk us through a little bit about what that looks like, because you showed me a demo, and one thing I thought was really cool, like you showed me your, you and your partner's chat. And then across the top of the chat, there was the different apps that related to, you know, your life and like what you two might want to talk about, or whatever long-term goals you might be setting.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  I think what's interesting about Wabi is that we're trying to shift away from, or not away, but shift, like basically build an agent that's not just focused on productivity. Obviously, productivity is very important. Getting stuff done is super important, and we do that for sure. Wabi is actually fantastic for that because it doesn't even ask you for inputs. When you sign up, it starts working for you from the get-go. But I think one of the bigger insights that we had over time, especially after having built Replica, is that most people actually don't care that much about saving time. I mean, it's, it's nice, but a lot of people really want to spend, you know, are looking to spend time, spend quality time, figure, you know, do things, ideally with other people,

• 8:02Rebecca Bellan?

  but not only. Spend the time you have well.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Because to spend the time you have well, and, you know, look at the most popular apps, obviously TikTok and Instagram, they're not there to save anyone's time. And so to us, AI shouldn't just be about saving time. It should help people spend it better, doing more of what they love with people they love. We believe that AI agents should bring people together, not give people more reasons to spend time alone with AI. And what I saw that, you know, over and over again, like people are launching these AI products that are really focused on the single-player experience. If you just text your agents, the pitch that we keep hearing is, oh, now you have your agent, you don't need to talk to anyone else. My agent will just talk to your agent.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And to us, that feels wrong, because why would these AIs make us even more disconnected?

• 8:51Speaker 02

  So that was kind of the main reason to build Wabi is to, to make something that's really focused not just on productivity, but also on long-term goals you might have, like, you know, losing weight, learning something that will help you feel inspired and discover some new stuff, whether it's a music show you want, you want to see, or a fun trip you want to take, but also just basically helping you engage with other people in a different way, maybe like help you feel more connected to other people. My Wabi, for example, tells me if I haven't reached out to a friend for a while and suggests, you know, what, what to say. I shared it today, but we have a chat with my boyfriend where we have a few apps that

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Wabi built for us, and one is, you know, all the music shows that we want to go to. One is a bookshelf, a shared bookshelf, where we put all the books that we're reading. We read a lot together. Ones we want to read, ones we're, you know, and Wabi suggests some other ones we might like.

• 9:49Rebecca Bellan?

  Did you guys both come up with those apps yourself? Did you decide like, oh, these are the apps we want? Or is that something that the agent decided? Or is that something you guys were like, this would be fun?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Mostly, it's either us saying what we want to achieve, so more talking about the goal and not the app itself, or Wabi just looking into our shared accounts and saying, hey, like, you, seems like you guys are going on this trip. I made you a little widget to keep track of everything. Or seems like you have, you know, a lot of things on your calendar that might be interesting to each other. I made a shared calendar for you.

• 10:23Speaker 00

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• 11:00Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, cool. Okay, so you can do, you know, these group chats, you can do singular chats based on different ones. Like you showed me that you have like a health chat. And then that has its own health apps for checking your workouts, tracking, you know, your diet and things like that. And so I think the multi-thread is a really interesting design choice because, you know, I've been testing out Muse, for example, and Muse is everything's in one chat, you know, even the long-term goals, you know, whether it's productivity or long-term goal setting, it's all in one chat. And I'm curious why companies would choose to do that if it was like a deliberate design choice, or if it's, you know, because it's maybe prohibitive or difficult to do the multi-thread. What do you think?

• 11:41Speaker 02

  I think it's a design choice. I clearly instinct, you know, wanted to do that all in like just iMessages. So a single thread makes sense because how there is, it is not possible for one contact to start different threads in iMessages.

• 11:54Rebecca Bellan?

  What are the downsides?

• 11:56Speaker 02

  I think the downsides are pretty significant. Actually, like if you think about a single threaded experience, it gets worse over time. So in the beginning, it's easy. You don't have necessarily to like, you know, think about it. You just start with one. But what I found with most of these agents is that after a while, as I use them, as I've been using them, the experience start to get worse. Now, everything is in one thread. I started maybe like 15 different tasks. And for me to see and in order to like actually understand what's going on, I need to constantly scroll and read and try to like, you know, fish this information from in this one, in the history of that one chat. And I think it also closes the door on productivity, like broadly, because yes, you can be proactive

• 12:39Speaker 02

  about certain things. But if you only have one single thread, you should be very selective in terms of like what you're actually going to send to that thread. And so for Wabi, for example, we have a bunch of different things that we want to maybe reach out to you about. Maybe there's a cool music show that you wanna, you wanna see. Maybe there's a new restaurant that opened that you might be interested in. Maybe some, you know, there's something, maybe there's a birthday coming up for one of your friends and we might recommend you get. If all of that was going into one thread, that would not be a great experience. Because we start threads for all important parts of your life, then all the notifications go to actually, all those messages go to a specific thread, and then it seems much more organized and much more manageable.

• 13:19Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. And I also wonder if you think this is a concern. You know, I've talked to a lot of researchers about what happens when the context window gets longer. And, you know, typically, the longer the conversation, the more that guardrails will break down. And also, there's more chance of hallucination. I'm not, we, I don't know that if anyone's reporting this with Instinct or Muse yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if that ended up happening down the line.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  That actually is also a problem. Of course, having things more organized allows you to, allows us on the, you know, the backend as well to understand better. Like, okay, well, this is related to, to your kid's stuff, and this related to your health stuff. So, you know, things are not being mixed up. And, you know, it's easier for us to follow the context. And then the threads share context. So we do understand, you know, in between each other. So if we need to pull some context from another thread, we can. But it definitely allows for a much more organized way of looking at things, both from the user perspective, but also from the tech side.

• 14:16Rebecca Bellan?

  And one other thing I wanna bring up about the threads that you share with people. So you are able to provide access to your calendar, your email, your bank account, et cetera. And that's not just for you. That's also what others can potentially access, but only within the chat. Can you explain why that's significant?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  So one of the interesting design decisions we made, product decisions, was to be able to, was to allow people to share permissions inside a particular chat. So for example, if you're talking to a boyfriend, you probably, you probably wanna share your partner, you probably wanna share a lot. So for that chat, for example, I give full permission for the agent to access anything. So if he wants to ask in that chat, again, he can do it separately, but in that chat, if he can, he can ask things like, when's Eugene free next week? Or if she bought tickets for that trip we were talking about, and so on, so on, so on. In some other chats, I only give access to, you know, some connectors, like for example, just for to my memory and my calendar. So it really depends. But I think

• 15:19Speaker 02

  this idea that you don't give permissions, you know, to everyone, but you give permissions to different chats, and you can see, because you're also in that chat. So if someone asks some information about you, you always see what actually is being asked and what Wabi responds. I think that's a really cool way to solve for shared context without necessarily breaking user trust.

• 15:40Rebecca Bellan?

  You're obviously coming into a space that's getting increasingly more crowded. I wanted to ask you about what you thought about the hardware angle of it all. So, you know, Meta earlier this month introduced Muse Gadget. So it's an open source project that lets developers build their own hardware that connects to Muse. Like, do you think that hardware will be an important piece of the AI interface going forward? Are you, or do you think like just being on our phones is, is it for the, for the near future?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  I think the phone is really powerful. It's very hard to replace, replace that. However, I do think that, you know, our phones need to become a lot more AI-first. So to say that the operating system right now on our phones is really not matching the current AI era. Like if you think about my home screen on my iPhone, it's still, you know, like 300 apps from the App Store. And 90% of those, I forgot what they even are. I don't even know what they do anymore, nor do I use them. And so I just think there's something wrong with that paradigm, I think we'll have, will still, our main way to access things will be a phone. It's just gonna need to become a lot more AI-first, AI-native. Whatever

• 16:52Speaker 02

  the operating system on it should be, should look a lot more like Wabi in my, in my view. There should be apps that are generated on the fly for you for, by an agent that knows you well. Everything should be a lot more social and multiplayer, again, just like Wabi. And probably the idea of, you know, downloading apps off the App Store is the main way to access software is probably not going to be the, the most prevalent way in the future. But I'm not necessarily a believer that we'll all buy new gadgets to, to access agents. The phone seems to be a perfectly fine way to do that.

• 17:29Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. Well, you know, clearly, it's, you know, fine for a lot of people. I mean, I think Muse has already had 2.8 million installs as of late September, you know, close to 700,000 US daily actives in terms of estimates. I don't think we have Instinct's numbers yet, and hopefully you'll share Wabi's with us soon. But this is, yeah, this is a competitive space. I mean, we're talking Instinct, they raised recently, you know, $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation. Wabi raised 20 million last year. I know you said that you're in talks to raise again. You know, you've just opened this up, not invite only. This is everyone can download it if they want to, right? So I can imagine

• 18:10Rebecca Bellan?

  that's a lot of compute. Like, that's a pretty expensive task to keep this running. Like, how close are you to new funding? Or like, how are you keeping costs down?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Well, we're definitely getting a lot of inbound interests. And right now, the, you know, the focus goes on making, also dropping the costs more significantly without, without decreasing quality at all. We do have some of the best engineers working on this. We have a 15-person team, and I would probably say it's the best team in consumer AI that you can find right now in this market. So hopefully, we can, we can provide a much better experience, but also at a lower cost than some of these other companies.

• 18:53Rebecca Bellan?

  And in terms of monetization, you don't have a strategy for that yet?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  For now, it's free. And I think we want to keep it free for a little bit, for a while.

• 19:01Rebecca Bellan?

  Free usually means ads or like data or something, right?

• 19:05Speaker 02

  For now, we're giving it free. It's probably gonna become free at some point. But, you know, it's not necessarily, it doesn't necessarily have to be ads. So for example, Instinct mentioned that they wanna go the kind of, they wanna stay free, but they wanna maybe take a fee from each transaction. I think the playbook yet for agents hasn't been kind of defined. So I think we're, we're all thinking about a few different options, and we'll try a few, a few different things.

• 19:31Rebecca Bellan?

  There's other companies we talked about on the show a couple of weeks ago, Tab, Underdog Hark, I can't remember which one, said that they wanted to do a take rate, right, for each transaction. But I think Sean made the point, one of our, our reporters, that that might change the incentive structure for the company, right? Like, might they start, you know, suggesting that you purchase more things, just so that they can, you know, facilitate more transactions? And like, what if someone doesn't even want to use it for transactions, right? Like, half the stuff that you described has nothing to do with transactions.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  I agree. And I think the interesting part, the interesting point for, for Wabi is that not every interaction is actually inference and compute-heavy. If you're talking to any of these agents, big agents you, you mentioned, you're just talking to, you're always burning computer. You're always asking them to do something for you. Whereas in Wabi, we're seeing people talking to each other because they're group chats. We're seeing people using apps. And, you know, when you use an app on Wabi, it's almost always, you know, it doesn't require much of compute at all. So for example, if I'm, if in my health thread, I'm tracking my weight with Wabi, I'm tracking my weightlifting, none of that is really compute-heavy. Because I'm not sending Wabi on these complicated,

• 20:44Speaker 02

  complex agent tasks. So I think that's the interesting case for Wabi is that like, not everything, every interaction is the super-heavy.

• 20:55Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, multi-step task.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Yes, multi-step task.

• 20:59Rebecca Bellan?

  That requires a ton of reasoning.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Exactly. I'm talking to a bunch of users on Wabi and, you know, my family and all that. So a lot of that, those interactions are free for us. So they're more like, um, and I do believe, do believe in that a lot. I think we will see more and more of these use cases on Wabi, especially the more, more people join. So you have more of your network that you can talk to.

• 21:18Rebecca Bellan?

  You know, that reminds me of something that, um, Amjad Masad from Replet said on stage, uh, last week, he was talking about, and a few people have mentioned this to me, that a lot of software development, especially like, you know, disposable software, personal software development is actually, you know, using, uh, L L Ms to build, uh, non-deterministic or deterministic software, right? So, you know, you're using it to build an app, but that app isn't like powered by an L L M. It's just a normal app, right? Rules-based, et cetera. And so it actually doesn't necessarily need to use as much compute, as you were saying.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Yes, for sure. And I, I do think that apps are critical. Like, if you think about it right now, you have, you know, your apps on your phone are separate from your agents or your AI, whether it's chat to your cloud or whatever, and then separate from, you know, your messenger apps where you're coordinated with other people. I do think that that all needs to, you know, be part of the same app, just like what we're doing with Wabi, where it's your group chat. You can message other people, your agent, your AI is right there with you and it makes your apps, so your apps are also right there with you. And I think those, um, apps are pretty critical because not everything can be done just through text, or even if it could, or even if you can do it, it's just not very convenient. I do think that, you know, we've

• 22:35Speaker 02

  always talked about currently, we're, we're in this Microsoft DOS era of AI interfaces, and there will be a Mac OS, a Windows, so to say, for everyone to use. And it's going to feel completely archaic that everything just happened in these single-thread chat chats.

• 22:54Rebecca Bellan?

  It, it already does.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And it's, and I do feel there's just so much to, that cannot be done in chat. Well, at least, like, you can't really, discovery is very limited. All sorts of repeating use cases that just don't work very well. Like, again, like, for example, if you think about some of the things I'm doing with Wabi is, you know, tracking my weight daily. How would I do that? Or tracking calories? How would I do that with Instinct? Like, obviously, I can just send it like, okay, this is what, you know, what I saw today on my scale, and this is what I'm eating. But then how am I going to, like, how am I going to find out? Like, for example, how much did I weigh, like, last week? I need to ask it each time? Or, you know, how many calories have I consumed today? Like, it's just stupid. What am I going to, every time, like, ask what's the total after each time I log something? Um, and these are just the simplest use cases that, you know,

• 23:40Speaker 02

  technically you could probably figure some way out to do that just in text, but it's just so inconvenient. It's, again, it's just like using your computer through a terminal. Um, it's not, i- it's just not convenient at all. And I do think it makes, uh, a lot of these use cases almost like, um, inaccessible for, for most users. So if you think about it, I do think there's, right now, there's just such a big spread between, you know, kind of the early adopters that, uh, uh, do know how to create really complex workflows with AI, and a regular consumer that still uses AI and chat GPT for, you know, chat GPT for search, and this general kind of question, as a question answering service, um, and

• 24:23Speaker 02

  don't really know how to, how to tackle all these other aspects of, of life.

• 24:28Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  So I do think that with Wabi, what we're trying to do is to really show how this magical, agentic experience can be brought to everyone, and not just for the backlog of your tedious tasks, but for all aspects of life, whether it's helping you grow as a partner, or connect better with, you know, your friends then, um, your, your friends or your network, or anything like that.

• 24:52Rebecca Bellan?

  Now, okay, so you, you had sent me, uh, you know, late last week, you sent me a, a link to, to try out the app. And the first thing I had to do was connect my email, and that was like a, like, I feel like a lot of people who really want to try some of these apps to get the most out of them, these, you know, personal agents, um, really still feel uncomfortable about connecting their personal information, their emails, like, letting a, a company read all of their emails. How do you make people feel safe?

• 25:24Speaker 02

  So we started with making people basically as part of like the onboarding, sign up their Gmail, and let us read through, through it, just mostly to create, to be able to create a really good experience. I do feel we have a pretty magical, uh, first-time experience where we pre-create a bunch of threads for you, based on what we learn about you.

• 25:45Rebecca Bellan?

  But then, do I have like 20 years of my Gmail, just like somewhere on a cloud that you guys are paying for? Is that what happens?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  No, we just, we just look through it to come up with these topics. We don't store it anywhere. But right now, we're working on a new version, the next update, you'll be able to skip it and kind of join Wabi without giving access to that. I mean, the caveat is, of course, is, in my view, is slightly less great experience, because you have to basically tell us what you want for Wabi to work on. But I do, like, in the end of the day, the more data you connect, uh, Wabi can just be a better assistant to you, a better agent, because we, we bet a lot on that proactivity element. But in order to be truly proactive, we need some of the, some of that context.

• 26:28Rebecca Bellan?

  Okay. So then, let's say I give you, you know, the connectors are, are all the specific APIs of each company, right? So if you're connecting your, your finances via Plaid, that's Plaid's connector, it's Gmail's connector, it's, you know, you're, you're trusting the connectors essentially from these larger companies, these bigger enterprises, to know that that's a secure connection.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Yes, correct. So, you know, we're really working with, you know, all the bigger companies and APIs to, to do that, to bring that experience.

• 26:59Rebecca Bellan?

  In terms of like data storage, data collection, this is, you know, a lot of people's extremely personal info, right? Like their, you know, medical information sometimes, their kids' information. What would be a red flag for you in another company? Let's say you weren't doing Wabi. What would be another, what would be a red flag for you in terms of not feeling safe to, to make those connections?

• 27:17Speaker 02

  I think there's a ton of, um, there's definitely, you know, a ton of stuff to look out for, but I do think that, you know, you probably want to make sure that that is a legitimate startup. It's not a one-person kind of vibe-coded thing, you know, that maybe has some funding, some bigger backers behind them. For us, I think the, you know, we've built, I built a company called Replica before, which is, which was the first AI companion, and people were sharing very personal information with us. They were, you know, they've, they've been having conversations with Replica that, you know, we would know things that no other service even today's AI agents, uh, you know, would never learn all the things that people would tell their Replica. And, you know, knock on wood, we

• 27:59Speaker 02

  had with, you know, over 40 million users, we had no, um, not one accident, actual incident with any of that, that data going anywhere. We made a firm commitment to our users from the very beginning with Replica that we will never sell their data, we're never moni- not, never going to monetize their data, never share it with third-party. And, um, you know, we, we kept our promise on that front, and also in terms of security. So I think we have pretty good track record. And, you know, we're making the same promise, uh, here with Wabi. I do think that, that trust is absolutely critical with your, with your users in the end of the day, and trusting you with all this information. Um, but I think it's,

• 28:40Speaker 02

  you know, we're, we're definitely building something that's, that, that people can trust.

• 28:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Uh, well, that's about all the time we have today. Thank you, Eugenia, for joining us, talking about positioning for Wabi and, um, what you think about AI agents in general. Thanks for coming on the show. Is there anywhere that our listeners can connect with you online?

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yes, of course. Um, uh, probably on X, um, E K U Y D A is my handle. DM me, my ideas are open. I'm happy to walk you through the app, but ideally, of course, just, uh, download Wabi and find me on Wabi. My handle is Eugenia, and text me anytime.

• 29:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Great. Um, well, thanks again, our listeners. You can find me on X and LinkedIn. You can find Equity on X and Threads at Equity Pod. Talk to you next time.

• 29:28Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is hosted by TechCrunch Senior Reporters and produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.