Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda launches Wabi — a 'YouTube for mini apps' where anyone can create, discover, and share personal software

Summary

Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Replika, has announced Wabi, a personal software platform built around lightweight, social, AI-generated mini apps. The company closed a pre-seed round, disclosed on November 5, 2025, though terms were not revealed.

Wabi's core mechanic is a walled-garden model: all mini apps live exclusively on the platform and cannot be exported to the App Store or downloaded locally. Kuyda frames this as a feature rather than a limitation, pointing to bundled integrations, a shared social graph, persistent back-end infrastructure, and data security as the trade-offs users gain by staying inside the ecosystem. The platform is targeting 50 integrations before year-end, spanning Gmail, calendar, location, and financial data.

Technically, mini apps are built in React Native, embedded inside a native Swift iOS shell — an architecture Kuyda draws directly from Replika's approach of layering a Unity container inside a native app. The "mini app" framing is deliberate: lightweight, prompt-adjacent UI workflows rather than full-featured applications, which sidesteps App Store review friction around dynamic code execution.

Two content categories are expected to drive the business. The first is retentive utility — trackers, to-do flows, family-shared tools, and daily workflow aids. The second is viral, personalized content moments — one-time-use apps that ingest personal data (Gmail, bank activity) and generate shareable outputs, like an action figure built from your inbox. Kuyda compares the latter to memes: low commitment, high shareability, and frictionless inside Wabi in a way that would feel too heavy as a standalone App Store download.

Multiplayer is a near-term priority and will ship as a default feature across all mini apps before general availability opens. Kuyda demonstrated the concept with a custom Wordle clone built to play with her mother, complete with a shared leaderboard and push notifications. A creator incentive program is under consideration, modeled loosely on the creator fund playbook used by major social platforms.

Kuyda's broader thesis positions Wabi as an interface layer for AI rather than a developer tool. She argues the industry is still in a "Microsoft DOS era" of AI interaction and that a GUI equivalent — a Windows or macOS for AI — is the next structural shift. Wabi is positioned as that interface, enabling users to discover, remix, or generate personal software without writing code. She cited a two-minute build of a Princess Elsa-themed Italian-language puzzle app for her daughter as an illustration of the creation speed the platform targets.

The Roblox comparison surfaced organically but Kuyda distanced Wabi from it strategically, emphasizing that the mission is to "set software free" rather than build a gaming economy. The investor on the deal described Kuyda as "the first AI native consumer founder," a characterization consistent with her Replika track record building one of the earliest large-scale AI companion products.