Khosla Backs Wajo, Personal AI Agent Startup Led by Ex-Google Engineer

Vinod Khosla is investing in and publicly backing Wajo, the personal AI agent startup founded by former Google and DeepMind engineer Shivani Poddar, according to TechCrunch. Khosla said the startup's trust-first architecture will win the agent market.

Wajo's agent product is named Fo. It operates across iMessage and WhatsApp as well as through a web interface with task cards, and it can call businesses or people on a user's behalf, create a virtual credit card to pay for tasks, and have its own email. Fo can also hire a human to complete a task when needed.

Wajo said Fo is used in 107 countries and has grown 10x since launching in late September. The startup did not disclose the amount raised. Besides Khosla, it has backing from Jeff Dean and Gokul Rajaram.

Wajo said it has applied for a patent for the virtual card system, which hides users' information from sites. In the coming months, the company said it will explore how Fo works in social settings across multiple users while keeping privacy intact.

Competition in personal agents

In recent weeks, the personal-agent space became closely competitive, with Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dot and Instinct taking the lead, according to TechCrunch. Before founding Wajo, Poddar worked in engineering roles at Meta, Google and DeepMind and was involved in building the first Facebook assistant and bringing Gemini to the world.