Instinct, the developer of an artificial intelligence assistant for everyday users, today announced it has raised a colossal $1 billion in a new funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $10 billion.
Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue joined the Series C round. The funding comes a month after the company said it raised $250 million, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, valuing the company at $2.5 billion at the time.
Still in early access, Instinct, officially Spear Street Technology Inc., is developing a personal AI assistant that can understand the nuances of consumers’ everyday digital lives. This includes planning a cross-country road trip, ordering weekly groceries or canceling forgotten subscriptions.
The AI agent can do this autonomously with only a few words typed on a PC or spoken into a phone. It uses its own phone capabilities and computer to complete tasks.
“We’re building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life,” said founder Noah Shinn.
Over the past few months, Instinct has built what the company says is a capability that lets the agent complete phone concierge tasks. This is a white-glove service meant for handling high-touch cases involving phone calls, high-end booking and more, such as restaurant reservations, doctor’s appointments, cancellations or sorting out bills.
The assistant can also coordinate plans on a user’s behalf with the Instinct assistants of trusted friends and coworkers. Using a trust network, the agents can exchange direct file sharing, PDFs, images and spreadsheets in order to quickly organize schedules, create rapid plans and work with a broad group to quickly sort out preferences and needs without everyone stepping on each other’s toes.
This is supported by enhanced location sharing via iMessage, allowing the agent to recognize when users arrive somewhere and provide location-based personal suggestions and preference-based responses.
The company said Instinct can “use devices the same way humans do,” suggesting that the core model works on a computer-use paradigm. It is designed with its own virtual phone and computer, and it uses them like a human assistant by loading web pages and apps and interacting with them directly.
Instinct is building amidst a market of roughly a dozen prominent AI-agent products and platforms now competing to become persistent digital assistants. Its closest startup rivals number only a handful — including Wajo, Ollie and Poke — while the broader field includes agentic versions of OpenAI Group PBC’s ChatGPT, SpaceXAI LLC’s Grok and Apple Inc.’s Siri. Meta Platforms Inc.’s Muse has also built an OpenClaw-like personal agent and is currently testing a similar human-concierge voice call capability.
Apple, in particular, has pushed its products into the personal AI assistant space; earlier this year, it reintroduced Apple Intelligence as the foundation for Siri AI, a super-powered version of the company’s long-running digital assistant. Siri has grown from a simple voice command assistant to a fully conversational AI agent that can access a user’s personal context, activate apps, add to calendar, send messages, organize images and more.