Instinct Raises $1B Series C at $10B Valuation for a Personal Agent With Its Own Phone Number
Four times the valuation in about a month. Instinct, the personal AI agent founded by Noah Shinn, raised a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported on September 28. Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue led. The Series B was $350 million at $2.5 billion, in August.
What Instinct does is the most boring and most valuable thing an agent can do: errands. It books travel and restaurants, buys things, pays bills, cancels subscriptions, orders groceries, does research and makes phone calls. It does this with its own phone number and its own computer, which is the design choice that matters. Instead of waiting for every website to expose an API, it acts like a person with a laptop and a SIM card.
The timing is sharp. The same day, Shopify opened checkout on its merchants' sites to browser agents and named Instinct as a launch partner, while Amazon is still blocking agents from buying at all. So the biggest personal-agent round of the year lands exactly as the web splits into places that let agents pay and places that do not. Instinct's growth depends on which side wins.
No user or revenue numbers were disclosed, which at $10 billion is a notable gap. But this also ends a long quiet stretch for agent funding: after weeks where the capital story was mostly M&A and infrastructure, investors just put a billion dollars on the consumer agent that does your chores.
Link: instinct.com
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What Instinct does is the most boring and most valuable thing an agent can do: errands. It books travel and restaurants, buys things, pays bills, cancels subscriptions, orders groceries, does research and makes phone calls. It does this with its own phone number and its own computer, which is the design choice that matters. Instead of waiting for every website to expose an API, it acts like a person with a laptop and a SIM card.
The timing is sharp. The same day, Shopify opened checkout on its merchants' sites to browser agents and named Instinct as a launch partner, while Amazon is still blocking agents from buying at all. So the biggest personal-agent round of the year lands exactly as the web splits into places that let agents pay and places that do not. Instinct's growth depends on which side wins.
No user or revenue numbers were disclosed, which at $10 billion is a notable gap. But this also ends a long quiet stretch for agent funding: after weeks where the capital story was mostly M&A and infrastructure, investors just put a billion dollars on the consumer agent that does your chores.
Link: instinct.com
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