23-year-old's AI 'life assistant' just became a $2.5B unicorn
Instinct, the year-old AI assistant startup led by 23-year-old founder Noah Shinn, just closed a $250M Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, pushing its valuation to $2.5B. The pitch: an AI agent that texts and calls to run your life, planning road trips, buying groceries, even helping plan a wedding. Still in private beta with a deliberately lo-fi website, Instinct has also drawn backlash over sweeping app permissions and terms of use users call invasive.
Nothing says 'trust me with your life' like a 23-year-old founder and a permissions list longer than your lease.
Why it matters
A pre-revenue, private-beta app hitting $2.5B shows just how frothy the 'agentic AI' funding frenzy has gotten. Investors are betting big on AI that manages your whole life, even as users flag the exact kind of privacy overreach that tends to age badly.