Just a month after the startup Instinct, assisted by AI, announced its first round of financing with a company valuation of $2.5 billion, the company has now raised another $1 billion in financing. The institutions involved in the investment include Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue. This round of financing has raised the company's valuation to $10 billion.
The financing news of the company was reported by The Information earlier this month. Instinct confirmed in a press release on Monday that this is a Series C financing round. For a startup that only launched an invitation-based service in August 2026, this is a rather rapid growth financing round.
Such rapid financing demonstrates the market's enthusiasm for a new type of consumer-grade AI agents. These products can not only answer questions and engage in conversations but also truly complete tasks on behalf of users, including booking travel itineraries or restaurants, making purchases, paying bills, canceling subscriptions, conducting tedious research, and ordering groceries.
When users request to perform a certain task, Instinct uses its own phone number and computer. The company has also recently introduced other new features, such as “concierge”, which can make calls on behalf of users to handle some matters that cannot be scheduled online; as well as “trusted person network”, which allows one person’s Instinct to coordinate plans on behalf of their friends’ agents.
However, these capabilities come with a cost: some users are questioning how much personal information they need to disclose to the AI agents in order to obtain such functions. The privacy policy of the initial version of Instinct was particularly concerning due to its overly broad scope. Since then, the policy has been updated.
Although this AI assistant has achieved viral spread, Instinct is now facing new competition from Meta's own AI assistant Muse. Muse offers many similar functions and also has a system that can be deeply integrated with Meta social products. This means that Muse can not only do most of what Instinct can, but it can also perform tasks such as monitoring and summarizing your Instagram private messages or Facebook group content, as well as following Marketplace product lists.
These capabilities have propelled Muse to the top of the US app store, with downloads reaching millions. Instinct still communicates with users via text messages and has not yet launched a mobile app. This startup has also not disclosed the number of users or any growth indicators, but clearly, its investors have seen something they recognize as valuable.
Instinct refused to arrange for founder Noah Shinn to be interviewed on the occasion of this financing announcement, but shared a statement signed by him: "We built Instinct to make it the best personal agent, capable of handling those highly personalized and nuanced tasks in daily life. This financing will help us bring Instinct to more people and continue to build the future of personal AI. Now is an exciting and creative period, and we have just begun."
