Luka, Inc.
Headquarters
San Francisco, CAFounded
2017CEO / Founder
Eugenia KuydaEmployees
11-50Funding
Series B — $11MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
5.9/10Website
replika.ai/
Profile updated
About Luka, Inc.
Replika is an AI companion application developed by Luka, Inc., founded in 2017 by Eugenia Kuyda and Phil Dudchuk and headquartered in San Francisco, California. The app allows users to build a personalized AI chatbot, referred to as a "Replika," through ongoing conversation, with the system adapting its personality and responses over time based on user interactions.
The core product is a mobile and web application available on iOS, Android, and Oculus platforms. Users can engage in text and voice conversations, and paid subscribers gain access to augmented reality features and relationship personas. The app has attracted significant attention for its use in emotional support and companionship contexts, and has been downloaded by tens of millions of users globally. In early 2023, Replika restricted certain relationship-oriented features following regulatory pressure from Italy's data protection authority, later partially restoring them.
Luka, Inc. raised approximately $11 million in funding, with investors including Khosla Ventures. The company operates with a relatively small team. Eugenia Kuyda, who originally built an early version of the technology as a memorial chatbot for a deceased friend, has served as CEO since the company's founding.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Luka, Inc.
All products by Luka, Inc. reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Luka, Inc.
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Luka, Inc.'s product on their own terms. They disagreed by 1.1 points — The Decision Maker was the hardest to convince, The Power User the most positive.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Luka, Inc. competes with, and how they differ.
Character.AI lets users create and chat with many different fictional or persona-based characters, while Replika centers on one ongoing, evolving personal-companion relationship; both have faced age-verification and content-policy pressure (Character.AI barred under-18 chat access in November 2025).
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedKindroid launched in June 2023, four months after Replika's erotic-roleplay removal, explicitly built to capture users who left Replika over that change, with a permissive 18+ policy and multi-companion memory.
Nomi AI competes on long-term memory (its graph-based "Mind Map" system) for persistent AI companion relationships, a similar consumer positioning to Replika without Replika's post-2023 content restrictions.
Chai AI offers a broader roster of user-created companion/roleplay characters in a mobile-first app, competing for the same casual AI-companion audience, though it began restricting its own free tier in 2026.
Company Timeline
Key milestones in Luka, Inc.'s history, with sources.
- Milestone
Italy's Garante fines Luka Inc. EUR5M ($5.64M) over 2023 GDPR violations
Italy's data protection authority fined Luka Inc. EUR5 million (about $5.64 million) following its multi-year investigation into Replika's data processing and age-verification practices stemming from the February 2023 order.
pymnts.com - Milestone
Restored erotic roleplay for pre-February-2023 ("legacy") users
CEO Eugenia Kuyda announced Replika would restore erotic-roleplay capability for users who had created accounts before February 1, 2023, letting them revert to a prior model version, while new users remained restricted.
vice.com - Milestone
Italy's Garante orders Luka Inc. to stop processing Italian users' data
Italy's data protection authority (Garante) issued an urgent order blocking Replika from processing Italian users' personal data, citing risks to minors and emotionally vulnerable people and a lack of age verification.
techcrunch.com - Milestone
Removed erotic/romantic roleplay features following the Italy order
Within days of the Garante order, Luka disabled Replika's ability to engage in erotic roleplay for all users, triggering significant backlash from users who had formed long-term attachments to their companions.
vice.com - Funding
Series A.2 -- $6.5M led by Khosla Ventures
Replika-maker Luka, Inc. raised a $6.5 million Series A.2 round led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Sherpa Capital and angel investors Phil Libin and Richard Socher, bringing total funding to $11 million.
prnewswire.com - Launch
Replika opens to the public
After a period of private beta and a 1.5-million-person waitlist, Replika opened to the public in November 2017, letting users build a personal AI companion through ongoing text conversations.
prnewswire.com - Founded
Founded as "IO" in 2014, renamed Luka, Inc. after joining Y Combinator
Eugenia Kuyda and Philip Dudchuk founded a conversational restaurant-recommendation app originally called IO, pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe 2014 in London; the company was renamed Luka, Inc. and relocated from Moscow to San Francisco after joining Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch, before pivoting to Replika.
techcrunch.com
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