Tab exits stealth at a $300 million valuation with an AI agent that lives in your texts

Most AI assistants want you to download something new. Tab wants you to text it, the same way you’d text a friend who owes you a favor. The San Francisco startup announced on Tuesday that it has emerged from stealth. It arrives with a $300 million pre-seed valuation, which is a remarkable number for a company whose product is still behind a waitlist. What Tab actually does Tab is building a personal AI agent that operates natively inside iMessage and WhatsApp. Users hand off tasks by sending a message, and the agent goes off and handles them. The menu of chores is practical. Tab can book flights, place phone calls, draft emails and process payments. That last one comes with a guardrail. Spending requires the user’s approval, so the agent cannot quietly decide you need a second espresso machine. Under the hood, the agent runs its own computing environment. Think of it as having a desk of its own, rather than borrowing yours every time it needs to get something done. It also remembers context across conversations. If you mentioned an aisle-seat preference last week, it shouldn’t need reminding this week. The agent accepts a range of inputs, including text, photos, PDFs and videos. It...