Wabi founder Eugenia Kuyda aims to democratize app-building

Eugenia Kuyda remembers when one of her favorite apps became too bloated. All she wanted was a simple weight tracker. But she also got calorie counting, meal tracking, and a subscription she didn’t need. With Wabi, Kuyda wants to let users take app development into their own hands, using AI prompts to create simple apps that others can remix and share, all currently for free. It’s a more casual take on vibe coding than services like Replit and Cursor; Kuyda likens it to how You Tube democratized video distribution online. “As soon as the cost of creating software goes to zero, all of a sudden you can build so many things that wouldn’t exist before,” she says. Mimicking YouTube’s platform strategy has other potential advantages: Wabi spares aspiring app creators from the burdens of hosting their own creations. That means Wabi itself deals with things like hosting costs, personal data processing, privacy policies, security, and content moderation. The hope is that this will lead to an influx of small-scale apps that scratch specific itches. “You don’t have to create these monster apps with so much functionality, [because you don’t] have to justify people paying for it,” Kuyda says. The approach brings its own trade-offs. Users won’t own their creations or have an obvious way to break them out of Wabi’s walled garden, and getting people to download what is essentially an app full of miniapps could be a challenge. There’s also the question of how Wabi will eventually pay for all the free apps it’s generating with AI. But Kuyda, who previously founded the AI companion startup Replika, has already raised $20 million for Wabi’s preseed round. She believes the platform approach will ultimately prevail, especially as apps start connecting with one another and people cobble together exactly the kinds of software experiences they want. “We feel like the next act is really rethinking what our relationship with software is,” she says. This profile is part of Fast Company’s AI 20