Hint, a new AI startup co-founded by Martha Stewart, offers an AI assistant for homeowners
TechCrunch Sarah Perez
Martha Stewart just co-founded an AI app called Hint that manages your whole home for you. It's free for now and she's actually building it, not just lending her name.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Sarah Perez — read the original for the full story.
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Martha Stewart's latest venture isn't a cookbook or a magazine spread. It's an app. Hint, launching today, wants to be the AI layer sitting on top of your house — tracking maintenance, insurance, energy use, soil conditions, and every warranty document you've ever shoved in a drawer. Stewart co-founded the company alongside CTO Kyle Rush and CEO Yih-Han Ma, and according to Rush, she's not just a famous face attached to a pitch deck. He says he visits her about twice a week to walk through the app together, and she flags when the AI gets something wrong about soil or home care, weighs in on design and language, and holds real equity in the company rather than acting as an investor.
The product itself started somewhere narrower. Rush says Hint began in 2024 as a tool to help homeowners navigate decarbonization incentives, but the team pivoted once they realized nobody really has a proper app for managing a home overall. Now users enter their address and Hint builds a profile using public records, weather data, soil information, and utility details. From there they upload documents — inspection reports, mortgage paperwork, insurance policies, invoices — and photos of major appliances, which the app uses to walk them through upkeep tasks most people never think about, like vacuuming out refrigerator coils or flushing a water heater on schedule.
That's where Stewart's decades of domestic expertise apparently come in, shaping how the maintenance guidance gets built out. Hint sends push notifications as tasks come due, lets users tack on one-off reminders like fixing a window screen, and rolls everything into a single "home score" meant to show at a glance how well the house is being managed. A built-in chatbot handles the harder questions too — when the AC was last serviced, what you're actually paying per kilowatt hour, or whether your homeowner's insurance deductible is too high.
Under the hood, Hint runs on commercial AI libraries, mostly from OpenAI, with Gemini handling image analysis. Rush, who previously led engineering at Casper and served as CTO at Maisonette after building tech for the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns, says the plan is to keep the core AI free while eventually charging power users a subscription for things like managing multiple properties. Revenue right now comes from affiliate partnerships with service providers, which Rush insists is kept separate from the AI so recommendations aren't skewed toward whoever pays the most.
Hint has raised $10 million from a group that includes Montauk Capital, Brian Kelly of The Points Guy, Slow Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, Energy Impact Partners, Amplo VC, and Hannah Grey. The iOS app is live now, free of both subscriptions and ads, with Rush saying the goal is simply to get it into as many homeowners' hands as possible.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Slapping a celebrity co-founder onto an AI product usually smells like a branding exercise, but the detail that actually matters here is the firewall between affiliate revenue and the AI's advice — that's the part worth watching, not Martha Stewart's soil opinions. Home management is exactly the kind of unglamorous, document-heavy chore AI assistants should be doing instead of writing poems, so the category makes sense even if the celebrity packaging is a bit much. The real test comes when the premium tier shows up and the free-forever pitch meets a business model.
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