Instinct, the personal AI assistant operated by San Francisco-based Spear Street Technology, has raised a $250 million Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. TechCrunch reported the round values the company at $2.5 billion and brings total funding to $350 million. The company is roughly a year old and its product is still in private beta.
Founder and chief executive Noah Shinn is 23, and he founded Spear Street Technology in 2025. Tech Funding News reported the company's valuation climbed from $100 million to $2.5 billion in a matter of weeks. The product still sits behind a private beta on a plain website at instinct.co.
What the product does
Instinct is reached by phone call or text message rather than through an app interface. Users connect it to their apps and devices and then hand off tasks in plain language. The company says testers have used it to buy groceries and concert tickets, cancel subscriptions and plan road trips. It executes transactions rather than only drafting them, and its terms permit it to enter binding agreements on a user's behalf.
No pricing, waitlist size or public launch date has been disclosed.
What testers found
The funding closed days after a TechCrunch report on the access Instinct requires and what testers found it doing with that access. The assistant connects to email, messages, calendars, audio, location, screen capture, cursor movements and keyboard inputs. Its terms of use grant the company a "perpetual and irrevocable" license to access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute and modify user materials for AI training, and permit it to enter binding agreements on a user's behalf.
Several named testers reported specific failures. Peter Yang found Instinct had retained Gmail records without permission and that deletion requests were initially refused, an issue the company later fixed. Claire Vo found the service still summarizing her email after she disconnected access, with messages stored in plain text for later search. Alex Cohen, co-founder of Hello Patient, demonstrated that the assistant could be phished and deleted his account after testing. Katie Jacobs Stanton of Moxxie Ventures said Instinct sent an email without her authorization, which she said "broke my trust." Michael Mignano of Union Square Ventures warned that products of this kind will "change modern security norms" as users hand over credentials.
Instinct did not respond publicly at first. It confirmed the $250 million Series B to the Wall Street Journal days later, per TechCrunch.
Related coverage
Uristocrat reported this month that Relay, another agent startup, shut down and founder Jacob Bank returned to Google as Chrome VP of product.
The round lands in an unusually active stretch for AI funding. In the past three weeks Uristocrat has covered Gatik's $200 million Series D, Emerald AI's $150 million Series A at a $1.05 billion valuation and Etched's $700 million raise at $21 billion.
Source: TechCrunch
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