Particle.news
Download on the App Store

Replika Founder Raises $20 Million for Wabi, a Social ‘YouTube for Apps’ in Public Beta

The funding positions Wabi to expand its product team for a more reliable, discoverable beta.

Overview

  • Wabi secured a $20 million pre-seed backed by angels including Naval Ravikant, Garry Tan, Justin Kan, Amjad Masad, Akshay Kothari, DJ Seo, and Sarah Guo.
  • The platform lets anyone create, host, and share mini apps from prompts, with recent beta features for likes, comments, remixing, and user profiles.
  • Users can select foundational AI models such as ChatGPT or Gemini and can rewrite the prompts that Wabi generates.
  • Early testing surfaced quality issues like repeated outputs and stale or odd news sources, reflecting current model constraints the team says it is improving.
  • Eugenia Kuyda plans to use the capital to hire product staff, subsidize usage during beta, and test monetization approaches without ads, with a focus on an integrated creation‑to‑discovery experience that avoids app stores.