Martha Stewart is not lending her name to a line of pasta pots or bedding this time; she’s inside the software, helping shape an AI application that aims to become the command center for millions of American homes. Hint—shorthand for “home intelligence”—is a free iOS app that constructs a digital twin of your house, then augments it with a proactive maintenance calendar, an always-on chatbot, and a running “home score.” Stewart joined co-founders Kyle Rush (CTO, formerly engineering at Casper) and Yih-Han Ma (CEO, ex-Red Ventures) as an active equity partner, not a figurehead. “I go over about twice a week,” Rush says of their collaboration. “When it’s wrong about soil, she’ll say it.”
What Hint Knows About Your House Before You Tell It
After you enter an address, Hint scrapes public data to build a baseline profile:
- Property tax and deed records
- Local soil composition and drainage risk
- Air quality indices and climate-exposure maps
- Utility rate structures and provider information
From there, you upload inspection reports, mortgage documents, insurance policies, and invoices. The app can also ingest photos of major appliances—the water heater, the HVAC unit, the refrigerator—so that it can guide you through model-specific maintenance. The result is a deeply personal home dossier that many homeowners have never assembled in one place.
“People don’t really have an app to manage their homes,” Rush explains. Hint fills that vacuum, but it also surfaces connections most of us miss. It might warn that heavy clay soil under your foundation, paired with shifting rainfall patterns, increases the odds of slab movement. Or it could flag gaps in your homeowner’s insurance—a deductible that’s too high for the area’s storm profile, say—and help you weigh whether filing a claim makes sense.
The AI That Tells You to Vacuum the Fridge Coils
The app’s maintenance engine is where Stewart’s touch is most tangible. Hint builds a dynamic, personalized to-do list that evolves with the house and the environment. Instead of generic reminders, it sends push notifications when something needs attention. A few tasks it might suggest:
- Changing the refrigerator water filter every six months
- Vacuuming the condenser coils annually to reduce fire risk
- Flushing the water heater to clear sediment buildup
- Checking the water softener salt level before the well runs low
These are the kind of specifics that a veteran homemaker would keep in a tattered notebook—Stewart’s team is just digitizing that knowledge. Beyond the scheduled tasks, users can add one-off items like re-caulking baseboards or replacing a window screen. All of it feeds into a home score, a single metric that glances at how well you’re keeping up.
The in-app AI chatbot understands natural language, so you can ask, “What did the last HVAC service report say?” or “Am I paying too much per kilowatt-hour?” It can even discuss financial moves, such as whether a HELOC would be prudent given your home equity. Rush emphasizes that the recommendation engine is walled off from the affiliate network of service providers, so the advice remains unbiased.
The Backend and the Business Model
Under the hood, Hint relies on commercial AI libraries—largely from OpenAI, plus Gemini for image-related tasks. The app is free and ad-free for now; the plan is to keep the core intelligence free and later introduce a premium tier for power users (multiple properties, advanced features). The startup already generates affiliate revenue from vetted service providers, though Rush says that stream is strictly firewalled from the AI’s recommendations.
Hint announced $10 million in funding from a roster of investors that includes:
- Montauk Capital
- Brian Kelly (The Points Guy)
- Slow Ventures
- Tusk Venture Partners
- Energy Impact Partners
- Amplo VC
- Hannah Grey
The company’s ambition is broad: “We want it to be in the hands of every homeowner in the country,” Rush says. With a seasoned lifestyle authority at the product table and a technical stack that neatly ties together public data, personal documents, and proactive automation, Hint is betting that home management is the next frontier for practical AI.