Instinct in talks to raise $1B at $10B valuation, quadrupling in under a month

TECHNOLOGY

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Instinct in talks to raise $1B at $10B valuation, quadrupling in under a month

The invite-only personal AI assistant founded by a 23-year-old has attracted Sequoia and Benchmark as it races to meet surging demand

by
Diego Almada Lopez

Sep. 28, 2026

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A startup that barely existed two years ago is now valued at $10 billion. Instinct, the San Francisco-based personal AI assistant, has closed a $1 billion funding round at that figure, according to reporting by NYT DealBook.

The number that deserves a second look is not the $10 billion. It is the speed. Instinct was valued at $2.5 billion in late August 2026. This new round closed less than a month later at four times that price.

What Instinct actually does

The product is deceptively simple on the surface: a personal AI assistant you reach by text or phone call. You ask it to book a restaurant, respond to a message on your behalf, or negotiate a lower cable bill. It handles the task by accessing your apps and devices.

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Founder Noah Shinn built Instinct around the premise that the best interface for AI is the one people already use constantly: their phone. Shinn was 23 years old when he founded the company in 2025, having previously worked as a researcher at Sierra.

The service is currently invite-only and completely free. There is no disclosed revenue model, which at a $10 billion valuation is either a bold vote of confidence from investors or a question that will eventually need answering.

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Instinct has crossed 100,000 users, a number that sounds modest against the valuations being thrown around until you remember the product is still invite-only and has no marketing budget to speak of.

The funding stack and who is behind it

The $1 billion round brings Instinct’s total capital raised to roughly $1.35 billion, including a $250 million Series B that closed in late August 2026. Sequoia Capital and Benchmark are among the backers in the current round, according to reporting from The Information. Earlier investors include Conviction Partners, Greenoaks, Index Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins.

Instinct operates under the umbrella of Spear Street Technology, the holding structure through which Shinn has built the company.

Why the market is paying this price

The compute capacity issue is the near-term risk that sits underneath the optimism. As user volume grows, the system is already delivering delayed responses. Instinct is free and invite-only partly because it cannot yet serve unlimited demand at the quality it wants to maintain. The $1 billion raise is essentially a bet that capital can solve an infrastructure problem before that infrastructure problem becomes a reputation problem.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.