The race to build a personal AI agent is heating up, with Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dot, and Instinct among the leading contenders. Vinod Khosla, however, is backing Wajo, a startup founded by former DeepMind and Google engineer Shivani Poddar. His reasoning: trust. Khosla told TechCrunch that because an agent acts on a user's behalf, it must be trustworthy, and he does not trust a company like Meta, which makes money from ads, with his data.
Wajo's Fo agent operates across iMessage and WhatsApp and offers a web interface for tasks such as scheduling, gifting, and life admin. It can place calls to businesses or people, and in early tests by TechCrunch it successfully checked with an airline about upgrades, though a call to a partner about feeding cats was less smooth and disclosures were unclear. The agent can also hire a human to complete a task, generate a virtual credit card that keeps user details private, and maintain its own email address for conversations.
Poddar, who previously worked on the first Facebook assistant and on safety for Google's Gemini, says trust must be built into the product from the start because agents cannot easily unlearn data. Wajo has applied for a patent on its virtual card system and is introducing a trusted-contact list for calls, along with the ability to record a preference not to be called again. The company says it is used in 107 countries and has grown tenfold since its late-September launch, with backing from Jeff Dean and Gokul Rajaram.