Instinct Raises $1 Billion Series C

Personal AI agent startup Instinct announced on September 28 that it has raised $1 billion in a Series C round. Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue participated, and the company was valued at $10 billion. The valuation quadrupled roughly a month after Instinct raised $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation in August. "We're building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life," founder Noah Shinn said in a press release. "This funding helps us bring Instinct to more people and continue building the future of personal AI." The full press release that Metal reviewed contained no other terms of the financing.

The case for the money is transaction volume. In a podcast interview published on September 28, Shinn said annual transaction volume running through Instinct is approaching $1 billion, and explained that half of it is travel-related. According to reports, Instinct started as a private beta in February and opened as an invite-only service in August. Each user received five invitations. The company has not disclosed user numbers or growth metrics, and it is only taking waitlist sign-ups without announcing a timetable for broader availability.

The product is not a chat app. A user hands off a task by text or phone, and the agent uses its own phone number and computer to complete it from start to finish. Examples given by the company include planning a cross-country road trip, ordering weekly groceries and canceling unused subscriptions. Recent additions include Instinct Concierge, which makes phone calls to secure bookings; the Trusted Person Network, which lets users' agents coordinate plans with one another through the Instinct-to-Instinct protocol; and an integration with iMessage location sharing that offers suggestions on arrival at a destination. There is no mobile app yet. On security, the company said it uses isolated sandboxes, short-lived local credentials and identity-signed tool execution, along with a so-called active detective system that catches subtle hallucinations before an action is taken.

Personal data has long been a point of contention for the service. Metal previously reported on the controversy over Instinct's email access permissions. According to reports, the initial privacy policy, which was overly broad, has since been revised.

The competitive landscape shifted this month. Meta launched its personal AI agent Muse with almost the same features as Instinct, plus Instagram message summaries and monitoring of Facebook Groups and Marketplace. According to reports, Muse displaced ChatGPT as the top free app on the U.S. App Store and, by market intelligence firm Apptopia's estimate, recorded 2.8 million installs worldwide in its first 12 days. Metal previously reported that Meta unveiled Muse for small businesses. Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, replied on X to a post comparing the two services that "Muse is way hotter than the other personal agents," and last week twisted Instinct's name to write "Muse absolutely crushes Insect." On the podcast, Shinn called Muse a great product but said he spends "very little of my time thinking about competition."

The founder's background is another point investors noticed. Shinn, 23, attended Northeastern University before leaving in 2023. As an undergraduate, he co-wrote the paper Reflexion with Ashwin Gopinath, then a professor at MIT, on having AI agents reflect on feedback, store it in memory and do better on the next attempt. Using that approach, a model reached 91% accuracy on a coding evaluation, above GPT-4's 80%, and the work was presented at NeurIPS in 2023. After leaving school, he worked as an early employee at Sierra, an enterprise agent company co-founded by OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor.

Seen through the eyes of a content marketer, Instinct's growth formula is scarcity instead of advertising. "We spent $0 on marketing so far," Shinn said on the podcast, adding that word of mouth has led existing users to resell invitations on eBay. The five-invitation allotment became the billboard. Even a rival's mockery acted as a loudspeaker: according to reports, Wang's posts aimed at Instinct drew hundreds of thousands of views and more than 1,000 likes combined. Muse, on the other side, arrived built for deep integration with Meta's social products from the start. Instinct's scarcity is not purely staged, however. In an X post last month, Shinn cited "actively bringing up more compute" as the reason for keeping the service invite-only. The first test of this round is whether the word of mouth created by invitations turns directly into sign-ups once the $1 billion becomes compute and the doors open.