Vinod Khosla believes ex-DeepMind engineer’s Wajo will win agent market on trust

Vinod Khosla told TechCrunch he favors Wajo in the increasingly crowded personal-agent market primarily because the company built its product around trust and safety. Khosla contrasted Wajo’s approach with larger platforms, arguing users may be reluctant to hand broad access to companies whose business models rely on advertising.

Wajo’s core product, an agent named Fo, offers features similar to rivals such as Meta’s Muse and Instinct: it can operate via iMessage and WhatsApp, presents task options through a web interface, and organizes errands into categories like scheduling, gifting and life admin. The agent is capable of calling businesses or people to book or cancel services and can also generate a virtual credit card to complete purchases without exposing a user’s payment details.

A distinctive capability Wajo highlights is that Fo can recruit human workers to finish tasks that the AI cannot complete alone. In early tests reported by TechCrunch, the agent succeeded at calling an airline to check for upgrades but had a less smooth experience when attempting to call a private contact; the article notes that disclosure practices for AI-initiated calls remain an open discussion across competing agents.

Founder Shivani Poddar, who previously worked on assistants at Meta and on engineering at Google and DeepMind, emphasized that trust must be embedded from day one. Wajo is developing technical and product measures aimed at privacy and safety: the company has applied for a patent on its virtual card system that conceals users’ information, plans a “trusted contact” list for agent-initiated calls and records opt-out preferences for future calls. Wajo said it is used in 107 countries and has grown tenfold since launching in late September, and it counts backers including Jeff Dean and Gokul Rajaram, though it did not disclose funding amounts.