Martha Stewart thinks AI can make homeownership less complicated

Martha Stewart built a career around helping people care for their homes. Her latest idea is to put that work in an app. Stewart, who made her name building a media and merchandising empire around cooking, entertaining, and homekeeping, launched Hint in July with co-founders Yih-Han Ma and Kyle Rush. The home intelligence app uses AI to help manage home maintenance and provide homeowners with what they need to know. “I wanted to do—I called it a home organizer. I thought, ‘Well, we can use the computer for this,’” Stewart said on Wednesday at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. “When I started, nobody was even designing magazines on a computer, but I thought this would be a big time saver for everyone if we could figure out all our utilities, how to take care of the home, what about our roofs, what about the paint job on the house. All of these things, how can I organize this?” Decades later, AI has made that idea considerably easier to build. The company started with $10 million in seed money from investors and recently launched its app on iOS, with plans to launch on the Google Play Store soon. Hint tracks what a homeowner needs using data layers and proprietary te…