❯ Personal AI assistant Instinct raises $1 billion as its valuation goes from $2.5 billion to $10 billion in a month

An assistant that makes the call for youInstinct is a San Francisco company building a personal AI assistant. Users text or call it with a task and it plans the trip, orders the groceries or books the tickets. According to OfficeChai, it connects to the user’s email, calendar and messaging apps, is built mainly on open-weight models, is invite-only and free, and has announced no pricing.

A 23-year-old founder and 14 employeesFounder and CEO Noah Shinn is 23. He did machine learning research at Northeastern and MIT, dropped out in 2023, wrote the Reflexion paper on language agents and then worked as a research scientist at Sierra. The company has just 14 employees. Runtime Wire relays that The Information reported in mid-September that it had more than 100,000 users.

Four rounds in five monthsOn September 28, Instinct closed a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue. Its earlier valuations were about $50 million, then $500 million at a Series A in early August (raising $75 million), then $2.5 billion at a Series B on August 26 (raising $250 million).

$10 billion without revenueInstinct has disclosed no revenue or paying-user figures, and Runtime Wire notes that capacity strain and questions about data exposure came up during testing. It faces Meta’s Muse and the assistant OpenAI is building. Investors paying $10 billion are betting it can be first into users’ inboxes and calendars. Once those permissions are handed over, switching assistants is costly, but only if it avoids a privacy failure.

▪ SIGNALA free, invite-only company quadrupling in value within a month means capital is pricing a position, namely who first holds a user’s full account access, not revenue.