Instinct Raises $1B Series C at $10B Valuation to Bring Useful AI to Everyone

Instinct, the startup building a personal agent for everyday life, announced on September 28, 2026, that it has raised an additional $1 billion in Series C funding from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue at a $10 billion valuation, and detailed recent product updates for its early-access assistant.

The Series C Round

The San Francisco-based company, founded by Noah Shinn, said the additional $1 billion is intended to bring useful AI to everyone.

“This funding helps us bring Instinct to more people and continue building the future of personal AI,” Shinn said in the announcement, adding that the company is just getting started.

How the Personal Agent Operates

The assistant remains in early access, and the company describes a straightforward interface: users text or call, and Instinct uses its own phone and computer to complete the whole task from start to finish, whether that is planning a cross-country road trip, ordering the weekly groceries, or cancelling subscriptions left forgotten.

On its website, the company describes an assistant that connects to a user’s applications and devices — including email, messaging, screen, audio, and location — without introducing new interfaces, since it is trained to use a phone and a computer in the same way humans do. The core model is trained to understand and handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life, according to the company, such as following up on threads the user has dropped, proactively calling or texting the user, arranging a ride to the airport, and booking a handyman.

Recent Product Updates

Alongside the funding news, the announcement details several product updates the company said it has released in the last several months.

Instinct Concierge is a white-glove service meant for high-touch cases, such as making phone calls and high-end service booking; examples the company gives include booking a restaurant that does not take online reservations, getting on a dentist’s cancellation list, and sorting out a cable bill.

Trusted Person Network is powered by the Instinct-to-Instinct communication protocol: a user’s assistant can talk to other Instincts to coordinate plans on the user’s behalf, and the assistants support direct file sharing, including PDFs, images, and spreadsheets.

Location Sharing, shared on iMessage, lets Instinct recognize when users arrive somewhere, make suggestions based on personal preferences, or answer questions.

On privacy, the company said isolated sandboxes, short-lived local credentials, and identity-signed tool execution have been built into the product from day one and are continually being improved. It said a new active detective system catches subtle, nuanced hallucinations as the agent forms its responses, cutting them out before Instinct generates or executes a response.

Data Practices and Agent Authority

The company’s privacy policy, last revised August 26, 2026, identifies the operator as Spear Street Technology, Inc., doing business as Instinct. Depending on the permissions a user grants, the assistant may have access to connected applications and services, the content of messages, emails, and other private communications, audio and voice data, payment information, usernames and passwords for third-party accounts, and health-related information.

The policy states that information collected through use of the services may be used to evaluate, fine-tune, and train the AI models behind the company’s products, and that users can opt out of that training use by visiting app.instinct.com/settings. The opt-out applies on a go-forward basis, and information flagged for safety review may still be used for model training. The policy also states that information received from Google Workspace APIs is not used to train AI models, and that the company does not sell user information or disclose it to registered data brokers.

The terms of service, also last revised August 26, 2026, frame the product around Inputs users provide, Outputs the services generate, and Actions the services take on the user’s behalf. Users appoint the services as their agent to enter into agreements, commitments, or transactions on their behalf, and any purchase made through an Action is made by the user, not the company. Materials added to the feature known as the Vault are used only to provide the services and not to train AI models. The terms state that the services are not error-free, that Actions may not always be reversible, and that users must be 18 years of age or older.

The privacy policy’s security section cautions that autonomous agent features can produce unintended actions, including unintended payments or communications to outside parties, and that the assistant’s interactions with third parties may involve misleading instructions intended to influence autonomous agents. It encourages users to review actions taken by the assistant.

Expanded Access

The announcement directs users to app.instinct.co/login to stay up to date for expanded access. The company’s SMS terms describe waitlist updates and a welcome text message when a user’s spot becomes available.