Instinct raises $1B at $10B valuation for its no-app personal agent
According to a founder interview reported by Huxiu AI, Instinct — a one-year-old company with 14 employees — has raised a new $1B round led by Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue, lifting its valuation to $10B from $25B a month earlier. The product has no standalone app: users text, call and email it to book flights, cancel subscriptions and plan gatherings, and founder Noah Shinn says annualized transaction volume is already around $1B, about half of it travel. He says growth reached roughly 10% a day with no marketing budget, that compute is the main bottleneck, that about 40% of users link a credit card after roughly three weeks, and that Instinct plans to earn merchant transaction fees rather than ad revenue.
It shows a tiny team pushing a personal agent into real payments, where trust, permissions and compute — not model quality — become the binding constraints.