Instinct raises $1B Series C at a $10B valuation

Instinct, the San Francisco company building a personal AI agent for everyday tasks, said Monday it raised an additional $1 billion from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue, bringing its valuation to $10 billion while the product remains in early access.

A consumer startup just took another billion dollars, at a $10 billion valuation, from Sequoia, Benchmark, and Coatue, for a personal agent that is still in early access. The bet is on software that does the task — book, cancel, call — rather than a chatbot that only answers.

On Monday, 28 September 2026, Instinct said it raised an additional $1 billion from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue. The Business Wire release, carried on Financial Content at 8:03 a.m. Eastern, headlines the round as a Series C at a $10 billion valuation. Series C is a later growth round, new cash after earlier lettered rounds. A valuation is the price this announcement puts on the whole company. Instinct said the money is to bring useful AI to everyone.

Noah Shinn, Instinct’s founder, said: “We’re building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life.” He said the funding helps bring Instinct to more people and continue building personal AI. Those sentences are his, in the company announcement. Instinct is based in San Francisco.

Instinct said the product is still in early access, so a limited group can use it. A person texts or calls. The agent uses its own phone and its own computer and finishes the task from start to finish. The examples on the release are planning a cross-country road trip, ordering the weekly groceries, and canceling subscriptions someone forgot. A personal AI agent, here, means software that can take those multi-step actions for a person, rather than only answer a chat question.

Instinct listed product updates from the last several months. Instinct Concierge is a white-glove service for phone calls and high-touch booking: the restaurant that does not take online reservations, a place on the dentist’s cancellation list, a cable bill. Trusted Person Network lets one person’s Instinct talk to another Instinct, through what the company calls an Instinct-to-Instinct protocol, to coordinate plans. Those agents can also share files, including PDFs, images, and spreadsheets. Location Sharing runs on iMessage. Instinct says it can tell when someone arrives somewhere, offer a suggestion from that person’s preferences, or answer a question.

On privacy, Instinct said isolated sandboxes, short-lived local credentials, and identity-signed tool execution have been in the product from the first day and are still being improved. A sandbox is a closed box around the agent’s work. A short-lived local credential is a key that expires quickly and stays on the machine. Identity-signed tool execution means each action carries a signature, so the system can tell which identity asked for it. Instinct also named an “active detective” check that catches subtle hallucinations — details the model made up — and cuts them out before the agent writes an answer or takes the step.

TechCrunch reported the same morning that Monday’s release confirms a Series C, and that about a month earlier Instinct announced a fundraise valuing the company at $2.5 billion. That earlier valuation is TechCrunch’s. Monday’s Instinct release does not repeat it. TechCrunch also said Instinct has not shared user counts or growth metrics. SiliconANGLE, the same day, gives the corporate name as Spear Street Technology Inc. The picture is a screenshot of the Financial Content page that carries the Business Wire release, with the Series C headline, the $10 billion valuation, and Noah Shinn’s quote in view.