AI assistant startup Instinct raises $350M at $2.5B valuation, but privacy concerns linger

Instinct, a startup founded only last year and helmed by a 23-year-old, has managed to ride the wave of AI enthusiasm toward a gargantuan valuation over the course of the summer.

The company, which offers an AI assistant that has inspired enthusiasm among its early users, told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that it had raised $250 million in a recent Series B funding round. That new round brings the company’s total funding to $350 million and gives the startup a valuation of $2.5 billion.

That new funding round was co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, the Journal reported.

Instinct, which is offered by the company Spear Street Technology and is led by founder Noah Shinn, is an agent that the company says can efficiently organize your life. Users connect it to their apps and devices and can communicate with it via texts and calls.

“I’m thrilled with everything our early users are doing with Instinct,” Shinn wrote in a tweet on Wednesday. “They’ve told us they’ve planned cross-country road trips, bought weekly groceries and concert tickets, and cancelled hundreds of dollars of subscriptions. Someone’s even planning their wedding with Instinct.”

Instinct, which rocks a decidedly lo-fi website, is currently in private beta, but it has already inspired a certain amount of controversy due to privacy concerns. Online, users have worried about the overly generous permissions that the app requires, as well as its terms of use that disturbed some users because of their invasive potential. [This story was adapted from TechCrunch, which originally reported on the WSJ story.]