Instinct, the assistant with no device

For two years the AI assistant was supposed to arrive as a gadget. There was the pin on the lapel, the little box in the pocket, the pendant that recorded every conversation. Most of them are gone or forgotten.

The assistant the technology press could not stop writing about this autumn has no device at all. It is called Instinct. You send it a text message or call it, and it uses a phone number and a computer of its own to do what you asked. In August it was a private test. By the end of September it had raised money at a valuation of 10 billion dollars. This is its story so far, and what it tells a company.

Who built it

Instinct was founded last year by Noah Shinn, who is 23, and is operated by Spear Street Technology, a small company in San Francisco. Before that, TechCrunch reports, Shinn was a research scientist at Sierra.

His research explains a lot. In 2023 he was the first author of Reflexion, a paper on agents that learn from their own failed attempts by writing down what went wrong and trying again. In 2024 he and three colleagues published tau bench, a test that puts agents in front of realistic tasks with tools, rules and a simulated customer. Its finding was sobering. The best agents of the time solved fewer than half of the tasks, and in retail fewer than a quarter succeeded in all of eight repeated attempts. His work has circled one question: whether an agent can be trusted to finish a job. Instinct is his bet that it now can.

What it does

Instinct's own website is a single page. It promises an assistant that can use a phone and a computer the way people do, and says there are no new interfaces. There is no app. You connect it to your email, messaging, calendar and accounts, and then you ask, by text or by call.

Shinn has said that early users planned road trips, bought weekly groceries and concert tickets, and cancelled subscriptions. Since the invite only launch in August the features have come quickly. Instinct added a partnership with Stripe for bookings and purchases, and one with 1Password for logins. In September every user's Instinct got its own email address, so it can open accounts and write to businesses without filling your inbox. Then came Concierge, a service that phones businesses which cannot be booked online, rolling out first to early users. In October Instinct joined group chats, to plan a trip or a dinner even with friends who do not use it. And the agents of different users can now coordinate with each other through a network of trusted people.

The money and the numbers

The funding moved even faster than the product. TechCrunch reported earlier rounds from Kleiner Perkins and Conviction. In August, The Wall Street Journal reported a Series B of 250 million dollars at a valuation of 2.5 billion, led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, which brought its total funding to 350 million. On 28 September the company confirmed a Series C of 1 billion dollars at a valuation of 10 billion, from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue. TechCrunch described it as a startup of 14 people.

What is missing is as telling. Instinct has disclosed no user numbers and no growth figures. In a podcast interview, Shinn said that more than half of the transactions on the platform are travel, and that it is approaching a billion dollars in annual transactions. He did not explain how that figure is calculated.

The trust problem

The same weeks brought the doubts. In August, TechCrunch collected the concerns of early testers. The terms of service granted Instinct a perpetual and irrevocable licence to users' material, including for training its models, allowed it to collect screen captures, cursor movements and keyboard input, and let it enter binding transactions on a user's behalf.

The testers found the practical edges. One saw her inbox summarised hours after she had disconnected it. Another sent his own account an email with planted instructions to see how easily the agent could be steered, then deleted the account. A third, the investor Katie Jacobs Stanton, watched it send an email in her name without asking first. Her summary: “One unauthorized action can reset that trust to zero.”

Instinct told The Wall Street Journal that it took the concerns seriously, and its privacy policy has since been revised. For group chats, Shinn has described a stricter model: your agent asks before it joins a group, the group's agent cannot reach your personal accounts, and nothing is shared or done without permission.

The gadgets that came before

Instinct's rise reads differently next to the devices of the last two years. Humane launched its AI Pin in April 2024 at 699 dollars as a replacement for the smartphone. Less than a year later HP bought most of the company's assets for 116 million dollars, and on 28 February 2025 the pins stopped working. Limitless sold a 99 dollar pendant that recorded conversations until Meta bought the company in December 2025 and stopped selling the hardware. TechCrunch counts the Rabbit and the Friend pendant among the AI gadgets that did not take off.

The large companies are still trying. OpenAI says its first device, designed with Jony Ive's team, will not ship before the end of February 2027. In September Meta showed a keychain sized device called Muse Charm, built only for talking to its own agent. But the agents themselves no longer wait for hardware. Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct all do their work on a computer of their own, not on a gadget in your hand, and reach people through the apps and messages they already use.

What it means for a company

The lesson of the last two years is that the assistant does not need a new object. It moves into what people already use: their messages, their phone line, their email, soon their glasses. That has two consequences for a company.

The first is outside. Assistants like Instinct now write to businesses from their own addresses, phone them and book. Your next customer may arrive as an agent. It will read your prices, your opening hours and your booking rules, and it will choose the business it can understand and book without friction. Someone, or something, also has to answer when it calls. Timbre, our voice assistant for calls, reception, booking and messaging, is built for that side of the line.

The second is inside. The same kind of assistant is arriving on every desk, and it is only as good as what it knows: your prices, your rules, your clients, the way you write an offer. That is what Twin builds, a company's knowledge, rules, skills and integrations, delivered as source code, in Claude, ChatGPT and Codex or privately on Eigna.

The testers of Instinct learned the other half of the lesson. Trust is earned one correct action at a time, and the judgement about what may be said, promised and signed in a company's name belongs to a person. So start with the facts: write down what an assistant would need to answer and book for you, and keep it the same everywhere. Then give your own assistant that knowledge, with a person at the send button.