Thirty days separate Instinct’s last announcement from this one. The personal agent startup said Monday it raised $1B in a Series C valuing it at $10B, roughly four times the headline figure it carried in August.
Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue joined the round. The earlier $250M raise, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, priced the company at $2.5B.
The product works through its own phone number and computer rather than a chat window. A concierge feature places calls to restaurants and doctors’ offices that never built online booking. A trust network lets one person’s agent negotiate directly with a friend’s, trading files, images and spreadsheets to settle plans.
Instinct files under Spear Street Technology. It reaches users over SMS because it has not shipped a mobile app, and it has published no growth metrics or user numbers.
Adoption has not been frictionless. The first privacy policy drew criticism for reaching further than the service needed, and the company has since rewritten it. Users have also questioned how much personal detail an agent should hold before acting on its own.
Competition is crowding in. Meta’s Muse offers overlapping features plus hooks into Instagram and Facebook, while ChatGPT, SpaceXAI’s Grok, Apple’s Siri and smaller startups such as Wajo, Ollie and Poke chase the same ground.
Founder Noah Shinn said the funding would bring the agent to more people.
