Instinct (AI Company)

Instinct was founded by Noah Shinn around 2025 and is operated by Spear Street Technology Inc.; Shinn previously worked at Sierra, the AI company led by Bret Taylor. In September 2026, he described Instinct as a new company he had started about a year earlier.⁠[1][2][3]

Before its Series B in August 2026, Instinct had raised $100 million from investors including Conviction Partners and Greenoaks.⁠[2]

Instinct said it had raised a $250 million Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, bringing its total funding to $350 million at a valuation of $2.5 billion. The product was then still in private beta, with access requiring users to join a waitlist or receive an invitation from an existing user; after connecting apps such as Gmail, users could have it manage their calendars, send emails, and automate multi-step tasks. Shinn said early users had used it to plan cross-country road trips, buy groceries and concert tickets, cancel subscriptions, and even plan a wedding.⁠[1][1][2][2][1]

The product also drew privacy concerns: some early users worried that the permissions it required were too broad, its terms of service allowed the company to train models on user data, and the initial version of its privacy policy was criticized for its overreach before being revised. Shinn said the team was working to address users’ security concerns.⁠[1][2][4]

Just a month after the round that valued it at $2.5 billion, Instinct announced a $1 billion Series C from investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, and Coatue at a $10 billion valuation, roughly four times the previous one. The company did not disclose user numbers or growth metrics and did not make Shinn available for interviews, issuing only his statement: the company was building the best personal agent able to handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life, and the funding would help bring Instinct to more people and continue building the future of personal AI.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

The company was still in early access at the time and introduced several new features: Instinct Concierge, for tasks requiring phone calls or other complex interactions (such as securing reservations at restaurants without online booking, joining a dentist’s cancellation list, or resolving billing issues); the Trusted Person Network, built on an Instinct-to-Instinct protocol, which lets different users’ agents communicate directly to coordinate plans and share files; and arrival alerts and suggestions after a user shares their location via iMessage. On security, the company said its architecture used isolated sandboxes, short-lived local credentials, and identity-signed tool execution, along with an “active detective” system to catch subtle hallucinations as responses are formed.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

Instinct also faced competition from Muse, the personal AI assistant launched by MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry, which offers similar features and can integrate deeply with Meta’s social products; Instinct, by contrast, communicated with users mainly by text message and had no mobile app at the time.⁠[4][4]

In episode 493 of Invest Like the BestInvest Like the BestInvest Like the Best is a business and investing interview podcast hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy. Launched in 2016, it features conversations with investors, founders and experts about their ideas, methods and stories; the show is now part of the Colossus podcast network.Open the full entry, released the same day, Shinn said Instinct was still invite-only, with five invites per user, and that its user base was growing about 10% a day without any marketing spend; more than $1 billion a year in transactions now flowed through the platform, about half of it from travel. He said the company would not adopt an advertising model, instead keeping the product free for users and charging a transaction take rate to merchants that gain distribution through the platform, and said that delivering the product free for everyone for a lifetime was his personal goal, though he would not commit to it for now.⁠[6][6][3][3][3][3][6][3][3][3]

Instinct describes itself as a personal assistant that understands what users are working on and what is important to them, with no new interface: users simply text or call it. It can use a phone and a computer the way a person does, for example ordering ingredients for a new recipe, booking a train home for the weekend, ordering groceries, sending flowers to a friend, or finding a court for the weekend.⁠[7][7]

Instinct: Official website: https://www.instinct.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]