Text Tab on iMessage or WhatsApp to book, shop and stay private

You use Tab by texting it, the same way you’d message a friend. Ask it to order groceries, find a birthday present, make a reservation or book a flight, and it goes off and handles the job instead of sending you a list of links.

Three things make that possible. Tab has its own phone number, so it can make voice calls, including the ones you keep putting off, like calling a business to sort something out. It has its own computer, a separate online workspace where it can use websites without borrowing your device. And it has a wallet for handling payments.

Tab can also take in photos, PDFs and videos, draft emails, and remember what you’ve told it across conversations. Mention that you like aisle seats once, and it should remember next time.

Co-founder Ammar Amdani describes it simply: you text it like someone you trust, and it takes care of the bills, bookings and errands. He compares it to the family doctor or banker earlier generations had, someone who knew them and looked out for them.

Tab has built its pitch around trust. The company makes three main promises:

• No training on your data: Tab says your messages and information are never used to train AI models.
• Your card stays hidden: payment details sit in a secure vault that Tab itself never sees.
• You approve the big stuff: spending requires your approval, so the assistant can’t quietly buy something you didn’t ask for.

Amdani’s view is that making AI more capable is the easy part, since every company is racing to do that. The hard question, he says, is whether you should let it into your life at all. Any assistant that reads your email, makes calls or buys things is only as useful as your trust in it.

These are company promises, not independent audits. Tab hasn’t published details on how its vault works or who can access your chats. Until it does, it makes sense to treat the privacy pledges as a starting point for questions rather than a guarantee.

Tab was founded earlier this year by Brennan Erbz, Stafford Schlitt and Amdani, who is also an investor and co-founder of Adapt Ventures. Its backers include SV Angel, Valar Ventures and American Spirit. The company hasn’t said how much it raised.

The valuation is striking for a startup at the pre-seed stage, the earliest round of funding, and for a product still behind a waitlist. Tab hasn’t disclosed user numbers or revenue. Amdani says growth so far is mostly word of mouth and that another product is coming soon.

Investors are paying up because of the category. Plenty of AI tools answer questions, but far fewer reliably complete tasks for you. And by living inside iMessage and WhatsApp, Tab skips the hardest part of consumer software: getting people to download and learn a new app.

If you’re the kind of person with a growing list of errands, calls and bookings you never get to, a texting assistant like Tab is aimed squarely at you. It’s also part of a bigger shift. Tab competes with other consumer AI agents such as Instinct and Meta’s Muse, and AI assistants from major tech companies are moving into messaging apps too.

Before you hand any AI agent your card or your email, think about what it can do without asking. Check how it handles approvals, whether you can see a record of what it did, and how to delete your data. Start with low-stakes tasks, like a restaurant booking, before trusting it with travel or bills.

Tab isn’t open to everyone yet. You can join a waitlist on the company’s website, and there’s no public price. Availability details, including which countries are supported, haven’t been announced.

The next thing to watch is the new product Amdani has teased, and whether Tab opens up beyond the waitlist. For now, it’s one of the most-watched experiments in AI that acts rather than talks.