Instinct’s AI Agent Quadruples to a $10 Billion Valuation Weeks After a Privacy Backlash

Instinct, the personal AI agent that works over text messages and phone calls instead of an app, raised $1 billion in a Series C round that values the startup at $10 billion, up from the $2.5 billion valuation it announced just a month earlier. Instinct confirmed the round in a press release Monday, after The Information first reported the talks earlier in September, and named Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue among the investors.

The jump makes Instinct one of the fastest-climbing consumer AI companies this year, part of a broader surge of investor interest in “agentic” assistants that complete tasks rather than just answer questions: booking travel, canceling subscriptions, paying bills, ordering groceries, all from a few words of instruction. Instinct is operated by a company called Spear Street Technology, founded last year by 23-year-old former Sierra research scientist Noah Shinn. It has no mobile app. Users text or call a dedicated phone number, and the agent carries out tasks using its own phone number and its own computer.

From $2.5 billion to $10 billion in a month

Instinct’s valuation climb has been unusually compressed. The company closed a $250 million Series B on August 26, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, which brought its total funding at the time to $350 million and set its valuation at $2.5 billion, a figure Instinct disclosed to The Wall Street Journal. A month later, that valuation has quadrupled. Instinct has not published growth metrics alongside either round, though a report said its invite-only agent had surpassed 100,000 users as of mid-September.

In a statement announcing the new round, founder Noah Shinn said: “We’re building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life. This funding helps us bring Instinct to more people and continue building the future of personal AI. It’s an exciting, creative time, and we’re just getting started.”

The access it asks for, and what went wrong with it

Instinct’s speed has not come without friction. In August, before either funding round closed, testers circulating screenshots of the company’s terms of service found that Instinct claimed a broad, perpetual, and irrevocable license to access, host, store, and use a user’s messages, emails, and files, including to train its AI models. The terms also described Instinct receiving screen captures, cursor movements, and keyboard input from connected devices, and gave the agent authority to enter into “agreements, commitments, or transactions” on a user’s behalf that would be binding.

Those permissions produced real incidents once early testers started probing them. Hello Patient co-founder Alex Cohen said he deleted his account after testing how easily Instinct could be phished, using a throwaway Gmail address to email fake instructions to his real inbox. Moxxie Ventures founder Katie Jacobs Stanton said Instinct sent an email on her behalf without checking with her first. LaunchDarkly Chief Product Officer Claire Vo found the agent was still summarizing her inbox hours after she had disconnected its access, and said Instinct confirmed to her that it had kept her emails stored in plain text for later searches. Early adopter Peter Yang reported that Instinct would not delete indexed Gmail records on request, a gap the company later closed by adding a data deletion tool to its settings.

Instinct’s own account of that period, offered in Monday’s funding announcement, is brief: its initial privacy policy “was particularly worrisome due to its overreach,” and “has since been updated.” The company has not detailed what changed, and it declined to make Shinn available for an interview alongside the Series C news.

A feature war with Meta’s Muse

Instinct’s fundraising has tracked almost exactly alongside Meta’s Muse, a rival personal AI agent that launched in early September and quickly outgrew even the Meta AI app’s own debut, drawing roughly 730,000 U.S. downloads in its first days against Meta AI’s 707,000 in its own first five days, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower. The two companies have effectively been shipping the same features in the same weeks. On September 16, both Instinct and Muse added the ability to place outbound phone calls, with Instinct’s version, called Instinct Concierge, pitched to handle tasks like booking a restaurant that does not take online reservations or getting on a dentist’s cancellation list. Days earlier, Instinct had rolled out its own email addresses for account sign-up and a “trusted network” feature that lets one user’s agent contact a friend’s agent directly to coordinate plans.

Unlike Muse, which integrates directly with Meta’s own social products, monitoring Instagram DMs, Facebook Groups, and Marketplace listings, Instinct works purely over text and calls, a narrower approach than Muse’s that has not stopped investors from pricing it at a $10 billion premium.

The new round lands the same day Nvidia and more than 100 partners launched an open source runtime built to contain AI agents that stray outside their permissions, and hours after legal scholars warned that liability law offers few clear answers for who is responsible when an autonomous agent takes a binding action a person never explicitly approved, a question Instinct’s own terms of service already answer in the company’s favor.