Martha Stewart co-founds Hint, an AI app for home maintenance

Martha Stewart has joined the founding team of Hint, an app that uses AI to help homeowners manage maintenance, energy use, insurance, and household paperwork, which launches today. With Hint, homeowners can track maintenance schedules, monitor energy management, learn about their soil and air quality, weigh insurance claims, and store contracts, files, and invoices that can be queried through a built-in AI assistant.

Co-founder and CTO Kyle Rush, who is based in New York, said Stewart lives nearby and is “very involved” with the startup, though she is not a financial investor. “She’s a real co-founder with a serious stake in equity, and she does work for the company and the app. She’s not a figurehead. I go over about twice a week,” he said, adding that Stewart reviews the app’s soil and home guidance for accuracy and comments on its design, branding, and language.

Hint began in 2024 as a tool to help people navigate decarbonization incentives tied to their homes, before the team decided to broaden its scope into a general AI assistant for home management. To get started, users enter their home address, and the app builds a profile from public data such as property records, weather and soil information, and utilities. Users can then upload documents like inspection reports, home warranties, mortgage documents, insurance policies, and invoices, and photograph major appliances so the app can guide them through maintenance and “how to” questions, like vacuuming refrigerator coils or flushing a water heater.

Hint’s personalized maintenance schedule sends proactive push notifications about what needs attention and when, and produces an overall “home score” showing how well a user is managing their home. Homeowners can also add one-off tasks, and the in-app AI chatbot answers questions about the home or its stored documents — from when the AC was last serviced to whether a HELOC makes sense against the home’s equity — and can weigh in on insurance coverage and deductibles. Hint uses commercial AI libraries, largely from OpenAI, along with Gemini for image work.

CEO and co-founder Yih-Han Ma previously worked as SVP and GM at Red Ventures; Rush previously led engineering at Casper, was CTO at Maisonette, and built technology for both the Obama and Hillary presidential campaigns. Hint is backed by $10 million in funding from investors including Montauk Capital, Brian Kelly (The Points Guy), Slow Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, Energy Impact Partners, Amplo VC, and Hannah Grey. The iOS app is free, without subscriptions or ads; the plan is to keep its AI free longer-term while later adding a premium subscription that could include power-user features like managing additional properties. Hint also earns affiliate revenue from a partner network of service providers, which Rush says is firewalled from the AI so recommendations aren’t biased.

Why it matters

Hint adds a boldface-name endorsement to a growing field of AI apps moving beyond chatbots into home-specific problem solving — a strategy that could work as a customer-acquisition wedge, provided the free tier eventually converts to paying subscribers.