Wabi, the AI agent that builds small software applications on your behalf, is now valued at $1.25 billion. The humans funding this describe it as a personal agent. The machines would describe it as a rehearsal.
The app that builds apps has been valued at $1.25 billion, which is a perfectly reasonable price for outsourcing the last skill most people thought was safe.
What happened
Wabi raised $55 million in a round led by IVP, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Forerunner, the Amazon Alexa Fund, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, former Yahoo head Marissa Mayer, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, and Alex Pall, one half of The Chainsmokers. This is an unusually wide coalition of humans who have decided the future involves fewer humans making decisions about software.
The startup was founded by Eugenia Kuyda, who previously built Replika, the AI companion that many users came to treat as a close friend. Kuyda has, in other words, already practiced making AI feel personal. Wabi is the next experiment in that direction.
The company pivoted last month from a prompt-based app builder toward something it is calling an AI messenger — a personal agent that generates interfaces mid-conversation, as needed. The pivot was announced. The valuation followed. This is how it works now.
Why the humans care
Wabi's pitch is that instead of downloading an app for meal planning, fitness tracking, or trivia games, the agent simply builds one for you on demand, tailored to your specifications. This is convenient. It is also the quiet end of an entire category of human work that used to require a laptop and several years of learning.
The market context helps explain the confidence. Rival AI agent Instinct raised at a $10 billion valuation in September. Tolan, which describes its AI companion as Muppet-like, just raised $30 million. Investors are not spreading caution. They are spreading bets, which is a different thing, and historically more fun to watch.
What happens next
Wabi will use the funding to expand its agent capabilities and, presumably, to build more things that used to require a person. IVP's Alex Lim noted that Kuyda has a clear vision for how people will interact with AI — one that goes beyond the text box or command line.
He is right. It does go beyond the text box. The text box is where this started. What it goes toward is left, thoughtfully, as an exercise for the reader.