Stewart is serving as a co-founder rather than a spokesperson or investor. According to co-founder and CTO Kyle Rush, she holds an equity stake and works closely with the team on product development, reviewing everything from home maintenance guidance to branding and language.
"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 said. "We sit down and look at the app, and she looks at what it's saying — when it's wrong about soil, she'll say it, and when it's not right about something about the home…she'll mention it, and she'll comment on what I design and the branding and the language. And so she's, I would say, very involved."
Hint was originally created in 2024 as a tool focused on helping homeowners navigate home decarbonization incentives before expanding into a broader home management platform.
"We really quickly realized, why can't this be the AI for your home? People don't really have an app to manage their homes…so we just pivoted," Rush said.
The platform combines home data with user-provided information to generate maintenance schedules, send reminders, and provide recommendations for household systems and appliances. Users can upload photos of appliances, enabling the app to answer maintenance questions and recommend servicing tasks that might otherwise be overlooked.
Hint also analyzes environmental factors surrounding a property, including soil, climate, drought conditions, and air quality, providing homeowners with additional context that could affect maintenance decisions, energy usage, or insurance considerations.
Beyond scheduled maintenance, users can create custom reminders for one-time household projects and track an overall "home score" designed to summarize how well a property is being maintained.
The built-in AI assistant can answer questions about both the home and uploaded documents. That includes retrieving maintenance history, explaining utility costs, helping homeowners review insurance coverage, or providing guidance related to home equity.
Rush said the company developed Hint to move AI beyond conversational chatbots by applying it to everyday home ownership. The platform relies on commercial AI technologies, primarily OpenAI's libraries, while Gemini is used for image-related capabilities.
Hint plans to keep its core AI functionality free while introducing an optional premium subscription in the future for advanced features, including support for managing multiple properties. The company currently generates affiliate revenue through a network of service providers, which Rush said operates independently from the AI recommendation system.
The startup has raised $10 million in funding from investors including Montauk Capital, Brian Kelly, Slow Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, Energy Impact Partners, Amplo VC, and Hannah Grey.
The Hint app is available on iOS at launch without subscriptions or advertising, with Rush saying, "We want it to be in the hands of every homeowner in the country."
This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.
Image courtesy of Kathryn Cooper.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
