Thursday, July 23, 2026

Inside Martha Stewart’s latest startup—and the idea she’s been waiting decades to build

Martha Stewart is a cofounder of an AI home management app, launching next week.

John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images

Yesterday’s newsletter came your way from a winding drive up to Katonah, New York. I was writing from the backseat, on my way to Martha Stewart’s farm, where she’d invited a small group of journalists to preview the latest in her never-ending portfolio of projects. After passing by the peacocks (or, more correctly, peafowl) that Stewart often shares in slightly-blurry photos on Instagram, I was welcomed to a small guest house/office on the property (shoes off), where Stewart was ready to dive in.

At 84, Stewart seems to have more energy than most 25-year-olds. Last fall, she launched the skincare brand Elm Biosciences, which she’d been developing for five years. Next week, she’ll debut the other major project she’s been working on. Stewart is now a cofounder of an AI-driven app called Hint that promises home intelligence. Her cofounders are Yih-Han Ma, who led home services at Red Ventures, and Kyle Rush, an alum of Casper. The app is officially launching next Wednesday (right now you can join the waitlist).

Rush gave us a demo, and the app looks genuinely useful for homeowners. It pulls all publicly-available data on your house, and tells you things like what your soil composition is and how to care for your lawn, keeps track of details about all your appliances, and checks for better insurance rates every year.

So where does Martha come in? Of course, she’s the expert on all things home (and gardening). And the app also incorporates expertise from her decades of magazine articles and blogs. It takes a page from Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook (originally published in 2006 and recently enjoying a resurgence on TikTok), which teaches readers how to care for their homes and reminds them when to clean often-ignored appliances or curtains.

Stewart told us she had the idea for something like this in the 1990s, and thought about it more after she started restoring this 1770s farm. “I started to think about, how do I organize all my thoughts? How do I organize all my files? I don’t have time to really run the property,” she recalls. She even talked to Kleiner Perkins about what she then called a “home organizer.” Kleiner’s John Doerr told her the idea was “a little advanced” for what tech could accomplish at the time, she remembers. “I never stopped thinking about it. I always kept my list of things I would put in an app,” she says now.

Hint ended up coming to life after being incubated at Montauk Capital; it’s raised $10 million, and investors include Slow Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, and Brian Kelly (aka the Points Guy—a Stewart bestie who joined yesterday).

Hint is targeting the new homeowner beginning to understand their house. “That new homeowner is going to open the door, and they really don’t know much about their house,” Rush says. “But the town knows about your house. The internet knows a lot about your house. There’s a lot of information out there that you have no idea is already public about your particular dwelling.” The app is free at launch and plans to monetize through referral fees from home services providers, insurers, and more.

Stewart seems excited about this tech, and about AI. After all, you don’t become America’s first self-made female billionaire without embracing new ideas. “We’re fully agentic—isn’t that the right word?” she asked yesterday. “I’m learning all this stuff. I know how many agents we have and all this stuff that’s going on.”

But, obviously, she’s still grounded in the offline world. After previewing the app, we had an outdoor lunch—tomato tart, fennel salad, salmon in a dill sauce, and the best iced tea I’ve ever had.

“I get bored if I’m focusing on one thing,” she says.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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