According to a TechCrunch report, Martha Stewart is entering the AI software era in her signature style: she has joined the founding team of Hint, a new app that leverages artificial intelligence technology to manage tasks related to home maintenance and property management. Officially launched, the app is designed to help homeowners tackle various challenges surrounding maintenance schedules, ongoing tasks, energy management, understanding soil and air quality, reviewing insurance claims, and more. Additionally, the app serves as a storage space for various contracts, files, and invoices related to the home and its upkeep, which can be queried directly through an AI assistant built into the system.
Hands-On Partnership: Martha Stewart's Involvement
Kyle Rush, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Hint, who is based in New York, emphasizes that the founder of the home and hospitality empire lives nearby and is deeply involved in the new startup, though she is not a financial investor. According to Rush, Stewart is a true co-founder with a significant equity stake in the company, and she actively works for the company and the app itself, rather than just serving as a figurehead. Rush shares that he meets with her at her home about twice a week, where they sit together and review the app in depth. During these meetings, Stewart reviews the system's outputs and answers; when the app is wrong about details regarding soil or home maintenance, she points it out immediately. Furthermore, she is involved in the design, branding, and the language used by the app. Her involvement is built on decades of experience in managing homes, guiding the app's development in several key areas.
Building a Property Profile Based on Public Data and Documents
To start using the Hint app, users are required to enter their residential address. The app then builds a comprehensive profile of the home based on available public data, such as property records, weather information, soil quality, utilities, and more. In the next stage, users can upload a wide range of personal documents related to the property, including inspection reports, home warranties, mortgage documents, contracts, insurance policies, and invoices.
Based on this data, the app is capable of providing in-depth information about onsite conditions. For example, it displays data about the soil underneath the home's foundation and explains how the soil type might affect lawn drainage or the movement and risk of foundation shifting. Furthermore, users can learn about the air quality around the home and how climate or drought information might affect flood potential, home insurance rates, or energy consumption on the property.
Risk Mitigation and Preventive Maintenance of Appliances
Another significant part of using the app involves uploading photos of the home's major appliances. These photos allow Hint to guide users through instructional questions ("how-to") and various maintenance tasks. Rush notes that this is information that might surprise many users, as many people are unaware of the small and vital tasks required to maintain their appliances. For instance, while most people know they need to replace their refrigerator's water filter, many are unaware that they should vacuum dust from the refrigerator coils on certain models to prevent fire hazards. Additional examples include knowing when to flush a hot water heater or when to check the salt level in a home water well.
Hint’s personalized maintenance schedule relieves users of the need to remember these details on their own. The system sends proactive push notifications updating them on what requires attention and when. This schedule evolves and changes along with the home, based on the system's understanding of the structure itself, the installed systems, and the broader macroeconomic and environmental context. Additionally, homeowners can add one-off tasks to their maintenance plans, such as a reminder to replace a damaged window screen, re-seal baseboards, or any other task that comes up. To provide a quick status overview, Hint also offers a general index called a "home score"—a number that allows users to understand at a glance how well they are managing their home so far.
Dedicated Chatbot for Complex Inquiries and Data Analysis
Aside from schedules and maintenance alerts, the app includes a built-in chatbot based on artificial intelligence. The chatbot allows users to ask any question related to the home or the documents uploaded to it. Questions can range from the very simple, such as when the air conditioning system was last serviced, to much more complex inquiries, such as how much the user pays per kilowatt-hour of electricity, or whether it would be wise to use a home equity line of credit (HELOC) to leverage the equity accumulated in the home. Additionally, the app can guide the user through questions related to their home insurance, such as whether their deductible is too high, if they are missing certain insurance coverage, or whether it makes sense to file an insurance claim for a specific repair.
Technological Background, Business Model, and the Founding Team
The startup was originally founded in 2024 as a tool designed to help people navigate decarbonization incentives related to their homes, but the founders quickly realized that expanding the tool's use cases had much greater potential. "We really quickly realized: why shouldn't this tool be the AI for your home? People don't really have an app to manage their homes... so we just pivoted," says Rush. The app joins the AI ecosystem that aims to expand the use of technology beyond general chatbots and apply it to solve practical, real-world problems, while integrating Martha Stewart’s personal expertise to refine the experience.
Under the hood, Hint uses commercial libraries, primarily those from OpenAI, alongside Google's Gemini brand for analysis and image-related tasks. The company's plan is to keep Hint’s AI capabilities free, but later add a paid premium subscription that will offer advanced features for power users, such as managing additional properties. Currently, the app generates revenue from affiliate fees from its partner network of service providers. Rush makes it clear that this provider network is completely firewalled from the AI engine to ensure that the system's recommendations are not biased in favor of specific providers.
The name Hint combines the letter "H" from "Home" with the word "Intelligence". The company is backed by $10 million in funding from prominent investors, including Brian Kelly (known as The Points Guy), Slow Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, Energy Impact Partners, Amplo VC, and Hannah Grey. Currently, the iOS app is available for free download, with no subscriptions and no ads. "We want it to be in the hands of every homeowner in the country," Rush concludes.
Prior to founding Hint, Kyle Rush managed engineering at mattress startup Casper during its growth stages and served as CTO at online retailer Maisonette. Before that, he built technology for the presidential election campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Co-founder and CEO Yih-Han Ma, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, previously served as Senior Vice President (SVP) and General Manager (GM) at the digital media and technology company Red Ventures.