Replika grew from a memorial chatbot into a general companion

What happened

Replika's own 'Our Story' page, archived in 2019, states that 'Replika was founded by Eugenia Kuyda and Phil Dudchuk with the idea to create a personal AI that would help you express and witness yourself by offering a helpful conversation'. The same page then directs readers elsewhere, to a piece of outside reporting, for 'the full story behind Replika', rather than narrating the company's founding events itself. That reporting, published by Quartz and linked directly from Replika's own page, describes Kuyda building a conversational bot from text messages exchanged with a close friend, Roman Mazurenko, after he was killed in a road accident in late 2015, and states that Replika, built on the same underlying technology, launched in March.

What the documents show

The company's own page is notably restrained: it states the founders' names and a mission sentence but does not itself describe the memorial project, the friend, or the death that the outside reporting covers in detail. That is a choice about what a company puts in its own voice versus what it lets a journalist's byline carry. Replika's current homepage, read as retrieved on 16 September 2026, states 'in 2017, no one knew what AI was supposed to be. We built the world's first consumer AI app' and reports more than 42 million users worldwide, showing the product's own framing has moved further still, toward present-tense scale rather than any origin narrative.

The mechanism

The technical starting point the reporting describes, training a model on one person's own message history so its outputs resemble that person's patterns of speech, is a persona built from a specific corpus, not a general-purpose conversational rulebook. Replika's general product repurposes that same idea in reverse: instead of building a bot to resemble someone who died, it builds a bot shaped by the living user's own conversation with it, so the persona a user experiences is substantially a reflection of what they have put into it.

What it leaves open

Replika's own materials, as opened for this record, do not confirm several details the outside reporting supplies, including the exact date of Mazurenko's death; this record treats that reporting as a labelled secondary source rather than a company statement, and does not reproduce any message content it may have used.

• Does a company's own page state the facts a reader would need, or point to reporting it does not control?
• What is the difference between a persona modelled on one person's messages and one modelled on a user's own?
• Does a user-count claim on a homepage specify how 'user' is defined - registered, active, or paying?

A grief project and a mass-market companion app share a mechanism, a persona built from someone's own words, even though the company's current materials keep the two some distance apart in how they are told.