A 23-year-old founder just pulled off what most startups spend a decade trying to achieve. Instinct, the AI assistant company launched last year by Noah Shinn under the corporate name Spear Street Technology, has closed a $250 million Series B that values the company at $2.5 billion. Index Ventures and Benchmark co-led the round, bringing total funding to $350 million — a staggering trajectory for a product that hasn’t even opened its doors to the public yet.
The pitch is straightforward: connect Instinct to your apps and devices, then communicate with it through texts and calls while it handles the logistics of daily life. Shinn claims early users have used it to plan cross-country road trips, buy groceries and concert tickets, cancel hundreds of dollars in subscriptions, and even coordinate a wedding. “I’m thrilled with everything our early users are doing with Instinct,” he wrote on X, rattling off the use cases with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely believes the product works.
But here’s where the story gets complicated. Instinct is still in private beta, and its lo-fi website hasn’t stopped privacy advocates from raising alarms. Users online have flagged the permissions the app demands as overly generous, and the terms of use have unsettled some people who see invasive potential in the fine print. For a company asking people to hand over access to their apps, devices, and personal lives, that’s not a trivial concern.
Benchmark’s involvement is the detail worth watching. The firm backed Uber, Snap, and Twitter in their earliest days, and it doesn’t typically throw money at hype cycles without seeing something concrete. A $2.5 billion valuation for a beta-stage assistant with privacy questions hanging over it suggests Benchmark sees something the skeptics don’t — or it’s betting that the same AI wave that lifted OpenAI and Anthropic will carry Instinct along regardless. Either way, the gap between the product’s current state and its valuation is wide enough to deserve scrutiny.
