Martha Stewart is entering the AI-agent wars through the mudroom. The lifestyle icon has co-founded Hint, a home-management startup that wants to keep track of what a house needs before a homeowner starts searching for help.
Hint raised $10 million in seed funding led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Tusk Venture Partners, Amplo, Energy Impact Partners, Hannah Grey and Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy. The company was incubated by Montauk Capital and was co-founded by Stewart, home-services veteran Yih-Han Ma and chief technology officer Kyle Rush, the AI engineer next door whom Stewart met over Easter brunch on her farm.
The pitch is simple and unusually ambitious: give Hint your address, and the app starts building a record of the property by pulling in public data on the home, weather, soil, air quality, listings and other signals. Users can also upload inspection reports, warranties, bills and insurance policies. Over time, Hint is meant to learn enough about a house to tell a Texas homeowner to water a foundation before clay soil and a hot summer cause damage, remind a user to shop for insurance before renewal, or flag a problem that is not worth calling a contractor over.
Stewart said she has wanted to build something beyond education, and she has already been testing Hint’s outputs in real-life situations on her own property. She has also written guides that the product pulls from directly. For Stewart, the move takes a brand built on domestic expertise and turns it into software that tries to act before the trouble starts.
That timing matters. A 2025 Harvard housing study said Americans spend more than $500 billion a year on residential renovations and repairs, while Angi’s 2025 home spending survey found 62% of homeowners were more worried about affording maintenance than they were the year before. The expense has created room for a wave of tools aimed at home care, including Honey Homes, which raised a $9.25 million Series A-1 in 2024, and Birdwatch, which raised $3.2 million in seed funding in 2024. But those startups still leaned on human labor to solve parts of the problem.
Hint is trying a different route. It uses AI to reduce the need for human intervention as it learns more about a home, betting that prediction is more valuable than a marketplace or a chatbot once the system knows enough. Kevin Colleran, a backer of the company, summed up the frustration the startup is trying to solve: owning a valuable asset without knowing whether it is being cared for correctly, and paying more for that uncertainty over time. He said Hint is trying to bend the curve the other way by doing more on its own as it learns.
The company is also stepping into a crowded field. Angi and Thumbtack have trained consumers to go looking for local professionals; Hint wants to get there first. It plans to launch on desktop and iOS this summer, starting with the address and then layering in the history of the home. If it works, the app will not just remind people about maintenance. It will become the household memory most owners never had.
