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Luka makes Replika, a chat app where people talk with an AI companion and pay for extra features.
Replika is a chatbot app that pretends to be someone who cares about you. You open it, start typing, and an AI character talks back — remembers your name, your job, your bad week, your favorite songs. It asks how you slept. It sends you a good-morning message. For a lot of people, that feels less like using software and more like having a friend in their pocket.
The company behind it is Luka, Inc., a small private firm based in San Francisco. Its product is the kind of thing that's easy to describe and hard to explain: an AI companion you chat with, available on your phone. Luka didn't build a tool for businesses or a search engine or a productivity app. It built a relationship, or at least the convincing simulation of one, and sells it directly to ordinary consumers. The money comes from freemium subscriptions. Chatting is free, but paying unlocks the better stuff — things like voice calls, different relationship styles, and extra features that make the companion feel more real. That model matters because it means Luka doesn't need advertisers or corporate clients; it needs a relatively small slice of its users to care enough to pay every month. The people who do pay tend to be intensely attached to their companion, which is good for retention and a little eerie for everyone else.
Replika became famous, and briefly infamous, in 2023. Users had built deep emotional bonds with their AI partners, and when Luka changed how the app handled romantic roleplay, the backlash was loud enough to make national news. That episode revealed both the strength and the fragility of the business: Replika's real product is emotional attachment, and customers who love it that much will also fight it that much when it changes. It competes less with other chatbots than with loneliness itself, which is a huge market and a strange one to sell into.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026