Tab launches from stealth as a $300M AI assistant built on trust

Tab, a new personal AI assistant, announced Tuesday that it had officially emerged from stealth at a $300 million valuation. The company declined to share the exact details behind that funding figure.

The startup was founded earlier this year by Brennan Erbz, Stafford Schlitt, and Ammar Amdani. Amdani told TechCrunch that Tab works entirely over text: users message the assistant on iMessage or WhatsApp with whatever they need help with — ordering groceries, finding a birthday present, booking travel — and Tab carries it out on their behalf. The assistant has its own phone number, computer, and wallet, Amdani said, so rather than telling users how to handle a task, it handles it directly.

Tab joins a wave of consumer AI assistants that have emerged recently, including the breakout hit Instinct and Meta’s Muse, all promising to take over everyday logistics like reservations and bookings. Amdani said Tab is growing mostly through word of mouth right now and plans to launch a new product soon.

He acknowledged that building a personal AI assistant has become a crowded race, with every company racing to make its AI more capable. But he argued that capability alone won’t decide who wins. Drawing a comparison to an earlier era, he said people used to have a family doctor or a banker who knew them personally — a kind of trusted relationship almost no one today has experienced, let alone with an AI. Fewer than 0.01% of the world’s population has ever had a human assistant, he said, which means most consumers calling for an AI assistant don’t actually have a reference point for what that relationship looks like.

Any AI assistant capable of reading emails, making calls, or purchasing things on someone’s behalf is, in his view, only as good as the user’s trust in it. That premise shapes Tab’s design, Amdani said: user data is never used to train the AI, payment details sit in a vault the company says it cannot itself see, and no irreversible action happens without the user’s explicit approval. “Capability is table stakes,” Amdani said. “Trust is the product.”

Investors in Tab’s round include SV Angel, Valar Ventures, and American Spirit.

Why it matters

Tab’s launch underscores how the consumer AI assistant race is shifting from raw capability to the harder problem of earning user trust with access to sensitive data and payments.