Instinct, a year-old AI assistant startup led by 23-year-old founder Noah Shinn, has raised $250M in a Series B that brings its total funding to $350M at a $2.5B valuation, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Index Ventures and Benchmark co-led the round. The company, operating under the name Spear Street Technology, sells an agent that connects to users’ apps and devices and organizes daily life through texts and calls. Early users, Shinn said, have planned road trips, bought groceries and concert tickets, canceled subscriptions and even organized a wedding through the assistant.
The product is still in private beta behind a deliberately lo-fi website. Its popularity has also pulled in skeptics: reviewers flag the app’s sweeping permission requests and user terms that some call invasive.
The round is one of the fastest rides to a multibillion-dollar valuation in recent memory, a sign of how eager venture investors remain for consumer AI agents even as regulators and researchers probe their data practices.
