Vinod Khosla bets on ex-DeepMind engineer’s Wajo to win the agent race on trust
As Muse, Dots and Instinct crowd the personal-agent market, investor Vinod Khosla argues Shivani Poddar’s Wajo Fo agent is architected for trust and safety from day one.
The personal-agent market has crowded quickly with Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots and Instinct. Investor Vinod Khosla is betting on Wajo, founded by former Google and DeepMind engineer Shivani Poddar, for a simpler reason: trust.
“I think the most important thing in an agent, because it’s acting for you, is trust,” Khosla told TechCrunch. He argued Wajo is more trustworthy than Muse or Instinct because it is architected around trust and safety first — and because many users do not want to hand intimate data to an advertising giant like Meta.
Wajo’s Fo agent works across iMessage and WhatsApp plus a web interface that organizes errands into categories such as scheduling, gifting and life admin. It can call businesses, create a virtual credit card that hides user details, maintain its own email identity, and hire a human when needed. Wajo said the product is already used in 107 countries and has grown 10× since a late-September launch, without disclosing absolute user counts.
Poddar, who previously worked on Facebook’s assistant and on Gemini safety, said trust must be built from day zero because agents still cannot reliably “unlearn” personal data once they have it. Wajo has applied for a patent on its virtual-card system, plans trusted-contact lists for outbound calls, and lets recipients block future agent calls. Backing from figures including Jeff Dean and Gokul Rajaram underscores how privacy-first design is becoming a competitive wedge as personal agents move from novelty to daily infrastructure.
Source: TechCrunch
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