Four times in four weeks
Instinct, a San Francisco company whose personal agent works over text messages rather than an app, has raised $1bn in a Series C round at a $10bn valuation. Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue are named among the investors.
The number that makes this unusual is not the size of the round but the gap behind it. Roughly a month ago Instinct raised $350m at a $2.5bn valuation. The company has quadrupled its price in about four weeks without publishing a user count, a revenue figure or a growth rate.
Noah Shinn, who founded the company, said in the announcement: “We’re building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life.”
What it actually does
The service launched invite-only in August and runs through SMS. There is no dedicated mobile app; the agent is a phone number. It books travel and restaurant tables, makes purchases, pays bills, cancels subscriptions, does research and orders groceries.
Two recent additions explain the attention. Instinct Concierge places phone calls on a user’s behalf — the appointment that has to be made by voice because the business has no booking page. And a “trusted person network” lets a user’s agent coordinate with another user’s agent, which is the first consumer product to treat agent-to-agent contact as a feature rather than a research demo.
That combination — an agent holding payment details, calendar access and a line to other people’s agents — is also why the company has already had to revise its privacy policy after complaints about the first version.
The company it is being priced against
Instinct is not being valued as an SMS utility. It is being valued as a candidate for the position Meta is spending heavily to occupy. Meta shipped Muse this month, gave every user a cloud Ubuntu machine, an email address and a video avatar, and on Monday put the whole stack into a new enterprise division. Amazon locked Muse out of its store; Shopify let it in.
Instinct has none of Meta’s distribution and none of its scrutiny. It also has none of the disclosure. Meta publishes the number of businesses using its agent; Instinct publishes nothing.
What to watch
Three things would turn this from a valuation story into a business one. The first is a usage figure the company is willing to stand behind. The second is what happens the first time the agent completes a purchase the user did not intend — the failure mode of an agent with a payment method is not a wrong answer, it is a wrong transaction. The third is regulatory: an agent that phones businesses on a customer’s behalf and coordinates with other agents sits close to rules on automated calling and on payment authorisation that were not written with it in mind.
