Instinct Hits a $10 Billion Valuation 33 Days After Its $2.5 Billion Round

Instinct, a San Francisco maker of a personal A.I. agent, announced a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation on Sept. 28, with Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue named as investors. The number is announced rather than audited, and the sources available do not say whether $10 billion is pre-money or post-money.

TechFundingNews reported that the announcement names no lead among the three firms and that none of them commented. OfficeChai counts 14 employees, which works out to roughly $714 million of valuation per head.

Four rounds in about six months

The Series B was $250 million at $2.5 billion on Aug. 26, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. A $75 million Series A at about $500 million, led by Kleiner Perkins, came in early August, per OfficeChai, and an earlier round priced the company near $50 million. Total funding is a little over $1.3 billion by OfficeChai's count.

Set against the Series B, the new price is four times higher after 33 days. Benchmark is the only investor that appears in both of the last two rounds, so the firm marked up its own position fourfold in a month.

1. Earliest round (about)50 $ million
2. Series A (about)500 $ million
3. Series B2500 $ million
4. Series C10K $ million

Source: OfficeChai and TechFundingNews, accessed 2026-10-12

What the company has shown so far

Users text or call the agent, which acts through its own phone number and computer to plan road trips, order groceries and cancel forgotten subscriptions. There is no mobile app and access is by invitation. Noah Shinn, the 23-year-old founder and chief executive, said: "We're building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life."

Instinct has not published user numbers. The Information reported more than 100,000, per TechFundingNews, so $10 billion divided by 100,000 users is $100,000 of valuation per user. The product is free, OfficeChai says no revenue model has been announced, and no revenue has been disclosed.

Shinn co-authored the Reflexion paper at NeurIPS 2023 and was a research scientist at Sierra, according to OfficeChai. Sequoia was an early Sierra backer, which is the thread connecting founder and lead investor.

The trust problem and the Meta comparison

The agent's first terms of service drew criticism for a "perpetual and irrevocable" data license, which Instinct has since revised, per TechFundingNews. Katie Jacobs Stanton, founder of Moxxie Ventures and a user, wrote on X that the agent sent an email on her behalf without checking first: "One unauthorised action can reset that trust to zero."

The competitor with a distribution advantage is Meta, whose Muse agent launched Sept. 8 with a free tier. CNN, citing Sensor Tower, reported more than 2.5 million downloads, according to TechFundingNews. Meta can attach Muse to Instagram, Facebook and Marketplace; Instinct has a phone number.

The investors who did not take the lead matter here. Index Ventures co-led the Series B and is not listed in the Series C, per the two reports. The pattern is not unique to this round: TypeSafe AI closed $870 million at $7.5 billion with no named Fortune 500 customer, and Hone took a $60 million seed at $285 million. A company with no revenue and a free product is priced entirely on the expectation that someone will start paying for the agent or for the attention around it. The next observable event is whether Instinct announces a pricing model, since OfficeChai reports that advertising has been floated.