Martha Stewart is entering the AI-agent wars through the mudroom.
It all started at Easter brunch on her farm, where Stewart met Kyle Rush—her neighbor and an AI engineer—and realized he was describing what she says she’d imagined for years: software that notices the leaky ceiling, expiring insurance policy, or too-high utility bills before the homeowner does.
That idea is now Hint, an AI home management startup cofounded by Stewart, home-services veteran Yih-Han Ma, and chief technology officer Rush. The company raised $10 million in seed funding led by Slow Ventures, Fortune learned exclusively. Montauk Capital (who incubated the company), Tusk Venture Partners, Amplo, Energy Impact Partners, Hannah Grey, and Brian Kelly, the founder of The Points Guy, also participated. Hint will launch on desktop and iOS this summer.
Hint’s pitch is that homeowners don’t need another marketplace, checklist, or chatbot. The setup is disarmingly simple. “The first thing you do is give us your address,” Ma told Fortune. “That’s it.” From there, the app pulls public data on the property, weather, soil, air quality, listings, and other signals. Users can also upload inspection reports, warranties, bills, and insurance policies. Hint then builds a running record of the home’s history and needs. The practical upshot is the kind of advice most homeowners likely never think to look for or remember intuitively. It can tell a Texas homeowner to water a foundation before clay soil and a hot summer cause damage, remind someone to shop for insurance before the renewal date, or tell them when a problem isn’t worth calling a contractor.
The market is enormous and fragmented. A 2025 Harvard housing study reported that Americans spend more than $500 billion a year on residential renovations and repairs. Meanwhile, Angi’s 2025 home spending survey found 62% of homeowners were more worried about affording maintenance than they were the year prior.
While established platforms like Angi and Thumbtack have trained consumers to find local pros; Hint is betting the more valuable position is getting to homeowners before they ever need to search. Other venture-backed startups have circled the same problem. Honey Homes raised a $9.25 million Series A-1 in 2024 for a membership model built around dedicated handypeople, while Birdwatch raised $3.2 million in seed funding for an “autopilot” approach to home care that same year. Both rely on human labor.
Hint’s argument is that AI can sidestep the cost trap that has squeezed concierge-style home services at scale. “I’ve seen a lot of concierge and home management startups force their way through fragmentation with armies of coordinators and white-glove service,” Kevin Colleran, cofounder and managing director at Slow Ventures, told Fortune. “That’s where the economics fail at scale. Hint uses AI to bend the curve the other way. The more Hint learns about your home, the more the system can do without human intervention.”
For Colleran, the investment case begins with a simple anxiety. “I own this incredibly valuable asset and I have no idea if I’m taking care of it correctly,” he explained.
Stewart’s fingerprints are found throughout Hint, on the name, the app’s visual language, and even the logo’s shade of green—chosen to match the eggs from her farm. She has tested Hint’s outputs in real-life situations on her property and written guides the product pulls from directly.
“I’ve wanted to create something beyond education, something that could actually help proactively manage one’s home the way that I do—but the technology wasn’t ready for my vision. Hint is,” Stewart told Fortune.
The hard question is incentives. When Hint connects users with products or services, it may earn affiliate or transaction fees—a setup that has quietly compromised the independence of countless “unbiased” consumer platforms before it. Colleran said he pushed hard on this point before committing. “Once your bottom line depends on referral fees and take-rates, it becomes very hard to resist nudging people toward whoever pays you the most,” Colleran told Fortune. His answer, and Hint’s stated principle: The platform’s recommendations are blind to commercial deals. For a startup promising to be “100% on the side of the homeowner,” that’s not simply a footnote. It’s the whole bet.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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