Instinct, the startup behind a viral AI assistant that texts and calls on users' behalf, has raised $1 billion in a Series C round that values the company at $10 billion — roughly four times the valuation it reached just a month earlier.
Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue led the round, Instinct said in a statement confirmed by TechCrunch. The jump follows a $250 million round in August that valued the San Francisco company at $2.5 billion, founder Noah Shinn told the Wall Street Journal at the time. Neither Instinct nor its investors disclosed revenue or user numbers alongside the new round.
A Personal Agent, Still Early
Instinct's product is a consumer AI agent that communicates by text message or phone call and can be asked to plan trips, buy groceries, book tickets, pay bills or cancel subscriptions on a user's behalf. The service launched invite-only in August and has no mobile app yet; it operates instead through its own phone number. A newer "concierge" feature lets the agent call businesses directly to make bookings that aren't available online, and a "trusted person network" lets agents coordinate plans among friends.
Shinn, who previously worked at Sierra, the AI customer-service startup run by Salesforce co-chief executive Bret Taylor, said in a statement: "We're building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life." He declined interview requests, and the round's valuation jump — four times the company's worth a month earlier, for a product not yet broadly available — underscores how aggressively venture investors are chasing the agentic-AI category.
That category has quickly become contested. Meta's own AI assistant, Muse, offers similar capabilities and is woven into Instagram direct messages, Facebook Groups and Marketplace; it has already climbed to the top of U.S. app store charts with millions of downloads, giving Instinct a well-funded, built-in-distribution rival from day one. Instinct's privacy practices have also drawn scrutiny: an early version of its privacy policy was criticized as overly broad before the company revised it.
Instinct has not said how it will spend the new capital, but the company says it is continuing to build out security features — including isolated sandboxes and short-lived local credentials for the tasks its agent performs — and a detection system aimed at catching hallucinations before they reach users.