FUNDING • September 28, 2026 • 3 min read

Instinct Series C: $1B at $10B for a Personal Agent

Instinct, the San Francisco startup building a personal AI agent, announced on September 28, 2026 that it raised an additional $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue are the investors named in the company release on Business Wire, published at 8:03 AM EDT. The release headline calls it a Series C.

Instinct has not disclosed users, revenue, or any growth metrics. TechCrunch notes the same.

The numbers

Raised: $1 billion (company release)
Valuation: $10 billion (company release)
Investors named: Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, Coatue
Prior round (secondary-reported): $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, per founder Noah Shinn’s comments to the Wall Street Journal last month, as cited by Reuters via CNA. The Business Wire release does not restate it.

Taken at face value, the valuation quadrupled in about a month. TechCrunch puts the gap between the two announcements at roughly a month and says Instinct launched its invite-only service in August 2026.

What the product does, per the company

Instinct is still in early access. Users text or call it, and the company says it completes tasks end to end with its own phone and computer. The release gives three examples: planning a cross-country road trip, ordering weekly groceries, and cancelling forgotten subscriptions. TechCrunch reports there is no mobile app yet; the service runs over SMS and texting.

The release lists four recent updates. All descriptions below are the company’s own:

Instinct Concierge: a white-glove tier for high-touch work, such as phone calls and bookings with businesses that don’t take online reservations.
Trusted Person Network: an Instinct-to-Instinct protocol so one user’s agent can coordinate plans with another’s, including sharing PDFs, images, and spreadsheets.
Location Sharing: shared through iMessage, so the agent can recognize arrivals and suggest things based on user preferences.
Privacy Advancements: isolated sandboxes, short-lived local credentials, and identity-signed tool execution, plus what Instinct calls an “active detective system” that it says catches hallucinations before the agent responds or acts.

None of these capabilities has been independently tested here.

“We’re building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life. This funding helps us bring Instinct to more people and continue building the future of personal AI.”

— Noah Shinn, founder, Instinct (company release)

Why it matters

A $10 billion mark on an invite-only product with no published metrics is a bet on the category more than on disclosed traction. Consumer agents that act on a user’s behalf are getting crowded: TechCrunch points to Meta’s Muse assistant as direct competition, with deep hooks into Meta’s social apps. Instinct’s pitch rests on handling the personal edge cases (the restaurant with no online booking, the cable bill) and on the privacy architecture it describes. The next useful number from Instinct will be how many people actually use it.