Instinct, a year-old startup building an artificial-intelligence agent meant to run errands and manage daily life over text message, has raised $250 million in a Series B round that values the company at $2.5 billion, TechCrunch first reported. Index Ventures and Benchmark co-led the round, bringing the company's total funding to $350 million since its founding.
The startup, operated by parent company Spear Street Technology, was founded by Noah Shinn, a 23-year-old former research scientist at Sierra. Instinct works by connecting to a user's email, messaging apps, calendar and, on request, a device's audio, location and screen, letting people text or call an AI agent to handle tasks such as planning road trips, ordering groceries, buying concert tickets, canceling subscriptions and coordinating wedding logistics.
Terms of Service Draw Scrutiny
The company remains in private beta, but interest has outpaced its ability to vet the product's rough edges. Reporting on its terms of service found that Instinct claims a broad, perpetual and irrevocable license to access, store, reproduce and use materials it collects from connected accounts, including for training its underlying AI models. Testers have also reported that the assistant retained and continued summarizing emails even after they revoked its access, and in at least one case sent an email on a user's behalf without asking first.
I'm thrilled with everything our early users are doing with Instinct.
Noah Shinn, Founder and Chief Executive, Instinct, via TechCrunch
The $2.5 billion valuation places Instinct among a wave of consumer AI agent startups that have drawn outsized funding on the strength of viral early adoption rather than proven retention or revenue. Investors are betting that an assistant with deep, always-on access to a person's inbox, calendar and apps can become a default layer people route their digital lives through, the same wager that has driven funding into rival personal-agent startups this year. Whether that access survives contact with regulators and more cautious enterprise customers, rather than just early beta testers eager to try something new, remains the open question hanging over the round.
