A new AI assistant is rocketing across Silicon Valley.
Months after OpenClaw, the viral AI-powered assistant, captured the attention of the technology industry, a company called Instinct appears to be gaining traction among early-adopting techies.
The startup began testing Instinct in private beta in February and quickly generated substantial interest among venture capitalists, who are among its earliest users. Its popularity surged earlier this month, as users began posting about what they saw as a highly capable AI assistant that worked fairly seamlessly, a goal technologists have long considered a holy grail.
Instinct is raising a $250 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation in a round co-led by Index Ventures, founder Noah Shinn said. The steep price for the young startup reflects the continued frenzy surrounding AI investing.
Users of Instinct can call or text the AI bot and ask it to respond to emails, manage calendars, book a ride to the airport, arrange a handyman and more. Some users have reported using it to shop for homeowners insurance or order custom merch for a wedding.
"We saw someone buy a house on the platform. A lot of our younger users are using it to find apartment rentals," Shinn said. "It's a one-stop shop to do almost everything."
Silicon Valley has long been obsessed with using AI to create personal assistants, but most of those ventures haven't succeeded. Now, advancements in AI are turning that pipe dream into a potential reality.
Instinct comes from Spear Street Technology led by Shinn, who was an early employee at Sierra, the customer service AI company founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. Shinn, 23, dropped out of Northeastern University in 2023.
Since it was founded in 2025, Instinct has quietly raised $350 million, including the new round, from investors including Conviction Partners and Greenoaks, Shinn said.
A range of apps are already helping people to unload menial tasks to AI. Instinct competes with ChatGPT Work or SpaceXAI's Grok Bot, which are increasingly growing more advanced at executing personal tasks.
Shinn said that Instinct is "almost like having access to a super-human operator."
Some early Instinct users have raised security and privacy concerns. To gain the most use from the assistant, users have to fork over access to sensitive personal data. Instinct's terms also allow it to train its AI models on user data.
Shinn said they are iterating fast and taking these security concerns seriously.
"We've made many product improvements that enable us to prevent the agent from taking certain actions that maybe some users of our early group who used an earlier version of the product might have experienced," he said.
Venture capitalists are pouring billions into AI assistants designed to automate daily life. Whether that be by writing and debugging software, coordinating family's schedules or picking a March Madness bracket, the bet is that autonomous AI will soon handle many of our everyday tasks.
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