A new personal AI assistant has arrived. Meet Tab, which announced Tuesday that it had officially emerged from stealth at a $300 million valuation. (The company declined to share the exact funding details.) Tab is part of the rising trend of consumer AI assistants, like the breakout hit Instinct and Meta’s Muse, that promise to help people handle everyday tasks like making reservations and booking travel.
Brennan Erbz, Stafford Schlitt, and Ammar Amdani started working on Tab earlier this year. Speaking to TechCrunch, Amdani said the product works like this: Users simply text the Tab assistant on iMessage or WhatsApp whatever they need help with — whether that’s ordering groceries or finding presents for a birthday party — and Tab makes it happen.
“You text it like you’d text someone you trust and it takes the weight off,” Amdani continued. “The bills, the bookings, the calls you keep putting off, remembering the people you love. It has its own phone number, computer, and wallet, so it doesn’t tell you how to do those things. It does then.”
Investors in the round include SV Angel, Valar Ventures, and American Spirit. Amdani said the company is growing mostly by word of mouth right now and plans to launch a new product soon.
He acknowledged that this is now somewhat of a consumer AI race. “Everyone is racing to make AI more capable,” Amdani said.
“Your grandparents had a family doctor, a banker, someone who knew them and looked out for them,” Amdani said. “Most of us don’t have that anymore.” That’s where personalized AI can come in, but he said that the winners of this consumer AI race won’t necessarily be the ones with the best demos.
“We think the harder question is whether you should let it in.” Any AI assistant that can read emails or make phone calls or purchase stuff is “only as good as your trust in it.”
It’s why Tab is built around that idea, he said. “Your data is never used to train AI. Your card lives in a vault Tab itself never sees. Nothing that can be undone happens without your ‘yes.’ Capability is table stakes. Trust is the product.”
Source: techcrunch.com
