Back in 2006, the average person looking at YouTube would have seen amateur dancers, aspiring musicians, and home videos. An enterprising person would’ve seen an entirely new internet-native business model, made possible by creative people circumventing gatekeepers in traditional entertainment. YouTube (and later Instagram and TikTok) began as a place for amateurs to post videos, but evolved into a platform for passionate people to build brands and host internet-native formats (unboxing videos, “get ready with me” reels) that never would have made it on primetime. It’s one of many success stories for the long-tail creator on the internet.
We believe we’re at a similar turning point for software itself. Just as YouTube democratized content creation, Wabi is democratizing software creation, and we’re thrilled to be leading Wabi’s $20M pre-seed.
Long-tail entertainment has seen success on the internet. But it wasn’t until LLMs that long-tail software was feasible: it was simply too expensive to hire developers to build software with an unproven track record. Now LLMs are becoming more mature, and three major use-cases are emerging: chat, companionship, and code.
But even as coding has reached escape velocity, the only people who can successfully build end-to-end applications today are those who already have some familiarity with backends, frontends, and deployment. While barriers may come down eventually, most amateurs today stay stuck in “localhost” purgatory, because there is no AI-native GUI with an intuitive interface that doesn’t look like a DOS command line.
This is why we’re so excited about Wabi. Wabi is a platform that elegantly solves the UI problem by delivering a single platform for consumers to generate, remix, and consume personal software – no syntax required. Wabi allows you to prompt an app into existence, and iterate directly with the UI instead of the code. We’ve already seen people build apps around things like weight-lifting, clip-art generation, and fasting, and early users are amazed by the speed and simplicity of creating software built just for them. Even better, Wabi is a network, which means you can access, use, and modify any app built on the platform. Anything is possible, from creative mini-apps, to personal CRMs, to social applications.
Wabi is founded and led by Eugenia Kuyda, a formidable entrepreneur who has a track record of being early and right to emerging consumer behaviors. She previously founded Replika, which was years early to the companionship market and boasts 40M users today. She’s intensely committed, wildly creative, and exactly the kind of founder we like to back.
We believe we’re moving into an age when software becomes a default mode of creative expression, on the same plane as video, and that Wabi will lead that charge. We have not yet seen an AI-native product demonstrate network effects: most AI tools today are great at single-player use-cases, but don’t look like multiplayer networks. Wabi delivers a compounding feedback loop for software, where creation and distribution are coupled.
People used to criticize the creator economy as an investment area because it was hard to see network effects and durability in the space, with the exception of a few massive personalities. Creators themselves have to find clever ways to scale, and Wabi is showing us what a platform for the software-native creator looks like. Importantly, content decays over time while software compounds, and the value of the Wabi platform alongside it. New kinds of creators will emerge, and Wabi will be the place to discover them.
Just like we look back on the pre-YouTube era, and marvel that just a few TV networks monopolized content, we may look back on the pre-Wabi era with bafflement that just 20 million developers dictated the behavior of the software that we used. We’re thrilled to be backing Wabi, and can’t wait to see what you make.
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Anish Acharya Anish Acharya is an entrepreneur and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. At a16z, he focuses on consumer investing, including AI-native products and companies that will help usher in a new era of abundance.
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Justine Moore is a partner on the investing team at Andreessen Horowitz, where she focuses on AI — both foundation models and applications.
