Personal AI assistant Tab exits stealth with a $300M valuation

A new assistant exits stealth

A new consumer AI assistant called Tab has come out of stealth. According to TechCrunch, the company announced a $300 million valuation alongside its public launch, while declining to share the exact details of the funding behind it. The round drew backing from SV Angel, Valar Ventures and American Spirit.

Tab was founded earlier this year by Brennan Erbz, Stafford Schlitt and Ammar Amdani, TechCrunch reports, and it enters a fast-growing field of consumer AI assistants — a category that already includes the breakout hit Instinct and Meta's Muse — all promising to take over everyday errands such as reservations and travel bookings.

A helper you text, not configure

There is no dashboard to learn. Users simply send a message to Tab over iMessage or WhatsApp describing what they need, whether that is ordering groceries or finding presents for a birthday party, and the assistant takes care of it. Co-founder Ammar Amdani told TechCrunch that the goal is to make the interaction feel like messaging a dependable person: "You text it like you'd text someone you trust and it takes the weight off."

Part of what makes that possible is infrastructure. Tab has its own phone number, its own computer and its own wallet, Amdani said, which means the assistant can make the calls and payments itself rather than walking the user through each step. Its remit, in his telling, covers bills, bookings, the calls people keep postponing and remembering the people in a user's life.

Trust as the pitch

Amdani is candid that Tab is competing in what he describes as a consumer AI race, noting that "everyone is racing to make AI more capable." But he argues that capability alone will not decide the winners. An assistant that can read emails, place calls and buy things is "only as good as your trust in it," he said, and the harder question for users is whether they should let such a system into their lives at all.

That framing explains the company's positioning. Tab says user data is never used to train AI models, that payment card details sit in a vault Tab itself never sees, and that nothing irreversible happens without an explicit "yes" from the user. As Amdani put it: "Capability is table stakes. Trust is the product."

For now, TechCrunch reports that Tab is growing mainly through word of mouth, and the company says a new product is on the way.

Why it matters

A months-old startup commanding a $300 million valuation signals that investors remain eager to back consumer AI agents despite intense competition from giants like Meta. Tab's core wager is that the category will be decided less by demo quality and more by whether people are willing to hand an AI the keys to their inbox, their calls and their money. The company's privacy and approval guarantees are its own claims and have not been independently verified, but they point to the real bottleneck for this generation of assistants: an agent that can spend your money is only useful if you trust it enough to let it.