- Tab left stealth on October 6 at a $300M valuation but did not say how much it raised.
- Its AI assistant works through iMessage and WhatsApp, with its own phone number, computer and wallet.
- Instinct, Meta’s Muse and Poke already crowd the field, so Tab says trust is its edge.
Ammar Amdani says his grandparents’ generation had a family doctor and a banker who knew them and looked out for them, and that most people no longer do, he told TechCrunch.
His startup, Tab, wants software to fill that gap. It left stealth at a $300 million valuation, months after Amdani, Brennan Erb and Stafford Schlit began work on it earlier this year. The company didn’t say how much it raised.
SV Angel, Valar Ventures and American Spirit are among its investors. SV Angel, the San Francisco seed firm founded by Ron Conway, was an early backer of Google, PayPal and Facebook. Valar Ventures, co-founded in 2010 by Peter Thiel and Andrew McCormack, has backed Xero, N26 and TransferWise.
Erbz was an early machine-learning engineer at Snap and founded Hashletes, going through Y Combinator, according to the company. Schlitt brings startup operating and growth experience. Amdani previously co-founded the venture firm Adapt Ventures and built an e-commerce business
A text-message assistant with its own wallet
Users text Tab on iMessage or WhatsApp the way they would message a person.
According to its website, they can ask it to find and book a flight, move a hotel reservation, order a replacement part or turn a PDF into a spreadsheet. They can also send photos, screenshots, PDFs and videos.
Tab runs its own computer and browser. It can phone a hotel, a doctor’s office or a supplier, wait on hold and report back in the same thread. When a job costs money, Tab shows what it plans to buy, the total and who gets paid. Nothing is paid until the user approves
Tab is in private beta behind a waitlist. It is growing mostly by word of mouth, Amdani said, and plans to launch a new product soon.
A $300M valuation in a market that reprices fast
Tab’s rivals carry far bigger numbers. Instinct raised $250M at a $2.5B valuation on August 26. On September 28, it announced $1B at $10B from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue. That is a $7.5B jump in 33 days.
Meta launched its own agent, Muse, on September 8, with a free tier and paid plans at $20 and $100 a month, according to Forbes Australia. Closest in spirit is Poke, the iMessage assistant TFN covered at its $15M seed. TechCrunch reported it later raised $10M more at a $300 million post-money valuation, the same figure as Tab, but Poke has been live since September 2025.
Others work around the edges. Photon, which builds the messaging layer for agents, raised a $4.5M seed on October 1. Meta agreed to buy the agent startup Manus for more than $2 billion in December 2025, and China’s planning agency ordered the deal unwound on April 27. Perplexity, whose Perplexity Computer agent launched in February, was reportedly in talks with Nvidia in August at a valuation above $30 billion, up from $20 billion in September 2025, The Information reported via Reuters.
Money is following the category. Gartner forecasts spending on AI agents and assistants will rise from $29.2 billion in 2026 to $65.5 billion in 2027, and its figures imply roughly 13-fold growth between 2025 and 2030.
Trust is the pitch and the risk
Amdani says capability is no longer the differentiator. The winners of the consumer AI race, he said, won’t necessarily be those with the best demos.
The harder question, in his telling, is whether people should let an assistant in at all, since one that reads email, makes calls and spends money is only as good as the trust placed in it. Tab’s answer is that user data is never used to train AI, the card sits in a vault the company itself cannot see, and nothing irreversible happens without a yes.
If trust is the product, the number to watch is not a valuation. It is how many people hand Tab a card, and whether Apple and Meta keep the door open while they do.
