Hint is entering the growing field of applied AI with a specific target: the everyday work of owning and maintaining a home. The app, co-founded by Martha Stewart, launches today with tools for home maintenance, document storage, energy management, insurance questions, soil and air quality information, and more.
Rather than presenting AI as a general chatbot, Hint is built around one property at a time. Homeowners enter an address, upload records, add appliance photos, and use the app to understand what needs attention and when.
A Home Profile Built From Data And Documents
Hint starts by asking users for their home address. From there, the app creates a profile using public data such as property records, weather and soil information, utilities, and more.
Users can also upload the paperwork that tends to accumulate around homeownership. That includes inspection reports, home warranties, mortgage documents, contracts, insurance policies, invoices, and other files tied to the property and its upkeep.
The goal is to make those records useful instead of letting them sit in folders. Hint includes an AI assistant that can answer questions about the uploaded documents and the home itself. A homeowner could ask when the AC was last serviced, what they are paying per kilowatt hour for electricity, or whether a HELOC would be a good idea to tap into home equity.
The same document layer can also support questions about homeowner’s insurance. The app can help users think through whether deductibles are too high, whether coverage may be missing, or whether it makes sense to file a claim for a repair.
Maintenance Becomes A Schedule, Not A Memory Test
A core use case for Hint is home maintenance. After setting up the home profile, users upload photos of major appliances. That gives the app more context for how-to questions and maintenance tasks.
This matters because many home upkeep jobs are easy to overlook. The source article gives examples such as changing a refrigerator water filter, vacuuming coils on some refrigerator models to reduce fire hazards, flushing a water heater, and checking the salt level for a home well.
Hint turns those kinds of tasks into a personalized maintenance schedule. The app sends proactive push notifications about what needs attention and when. The schedule is designed to evolve with the home, its systems, and the broader environment around it.
Homeowners can also add one-off reminders. Examples include replacing a damaged window screen, re-caulking baseboards, or logging any other task that comes up.
Soil, Air, Energy And Insurance In One App
Hint’s scope goes beyond chores. The app can provide information about the soil below a foundation and how that may affect lawn drainage or foundation risk movement. It can also surface air quality information around the home.
The app uses climate or drought information to help explain possible impacts on floods, home insurance rates, energy usage, and other home-related concerns. Within the limits of the source, the broader point is clear: Hint is trying to connect home management with the external conditions that shape cost, maintenance and risk.
That makes the product different from a simple checklist app. It combines home documents, property data, environmental information, appliance context and an AI chatbot into one homeowner-facing system.
Hint also offers an overall "home score." The score is meant to give users a quick view of how well they are managing the home so far.
Martha Stewart’s Role At Hint
Martha Stewart is not described as a financial investor in Hint. Kyle Rush, the New York-based co-founder and CTO, says she is part of the co-founding team and is actively involved in the product.
“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,”
Rush says Stewart reviews what the app says, including cases where it gets information about soil or home topics wrong. He also says she comments on design, branding and language.
That practical involvement is central to how Hint is positioning itself. Stewart’s decades of experience managing homes are being used to guide the app in areas where homeowners may need specific, grounded advice.
From Decarbonization Tool To AI For The Home
Hint began in 2024 as a product for helping people navigate decarbonization incentives tied to their homes. The team later expanded the idea after seeing more potential in a broader home-management assistant.
“We really quickly realized, why can’t this be the AI for your home? People don’t reall y have an app to manage t heir homes…so we just pivoted,” says Rush.
Rush previously led engineering at mattress startup Casper during its growth phase and was CTO at online retailer Maisonette. Before that, he built technology for both the Obama and Hillary presidential campaigns.
Yih-Han Ma, co-founder and CEO, is based out of Charlotte, N.C. and was previously SVP and GM at Red Ventures, a digital media and technology company.
Under the hood, Hint uses commercial libraries, largely from OpenAI, as well as Gemini for image work. The plan is to keep Hint’s AI intelligence free while later adding a premium subscription for power user features such as managing additional properties.
The app also generates affiliate revenue from a partner network of service providers. Rush says that revenue system is firewalled from the AI so recommendations are not biased.
Hint, whose name combines the "H" from "home" with "intelligence," is backed by $10 million in funding from investors including Brian Kelly (The Points Guy), Slow Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, Energy Impact Partners, Amplo VC, and Hannah Grey.
The iOS app is currently available for free without subscriptions or ads. Rush says, “We want it to be in the hands of every homeowner in the country.”