Startups & Funding
Instinct raises $350M at $2.5B valuation as privacy concerns mount
Instinct, a personal-AI-agent startup founded only last year, has raised $250 million in a Series B round that values the company at $2.5 billion.
Instinct, helmed by a 23-year-old founder, has ridden a summer of AI enthusiasm to a gargantuan valuation. The company told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that it raised $250 million in its latest Series B round, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, bringing its total funding to $350 million.
Instinct is offered by a company called Spear Street Technology and led by founder Noah Shinn. It’s pitched as an agent that can efficiently organize a user’s life: people connect it to their apps and devices and communicate with it via texts and calls.
“I’m thrilled with everything our early users are doing with Instinct,” Shinn wrote in a tweet Wednesday, saying users have told the company they’ve planned cross-country road trips, bought weekly groceries and concert tickets, and canceled hundreds of dollars of subscriptions using the assistant — with one person even planning a wedding through it.
The product, which the company runs on a deliberately lo-fi website, is currently in private beta. But it has already inspired controversy over privacy: users online have raised concerns about the app’s overly generous permissions, and some have said its terms of use disturbed them because of their invasive potential.
Why it matters
Instinct’s valuation shows investors are still willing to pay a steep premium for consumer AI agents with viral early traction, even before the privacy questions those same agents raise get resolved.