San Francisco-based Instinct said on 28 September it raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation in a Series C funding round, Reuters reported. Forkast had reported a $2.5 billion valuation for the company’s Series B in late August.
Key points
- Instinct said its Series C raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation on 28 September.
- Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue invested in the round, according to the company.
- Forkast reported that Instinct’s Series B carried a $2.5 billion valuation in late August.
- Instinct says its products include a concierge service intended to handle bookings and phone calls.
Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue join the Series C
Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue took part in the round, Instinct said in a statement reported by Reuters. The financing followed the late-August Series B by weeks, giving the company a new valuation while it develops a personal AI agent intended to carry out tasks autonomously.
Instinct said it had released several products over the preceding months. They include a concierge service designed to make bookings and phone calls on a user’s behalf. The company’s description concerns tasks the service is meant to perform.
Instinct’s $2.5 billion Series B benchmark
On 17 September, Forkast reported that Instinct was in talks over a round at a $10 billion valuation. At that point, the publication said, the proposed financing had not closed. Instinct’s 28 September announcement puts the completed Series C at the valuation previously under discussion.
Forkast described the proposed $10 billion figure as four times the $2.5 billion valuation it reported for Instinct’s Series B in late August. It also put the company’s initial seed valuation at roughly $50 million and said the move from that level to the valuation then under discussion had taken about six weeks. Those figures refer to the company’s valuation, rather than the amount raised in either earlier round.
For comparison, Forkast reported a $48 billion valuation for Cognition AI in a Series E, up from $26 billion months earlier. It put Clay’s Series D valuation at $7.1 billion, against $3.1 billion previously. Those are reported valuations of other agent companies, not measures of Instinct’s revenue or the performance of its products.
Instinct’s concierge service and computing costs
Forkast described Instinct’s service on 17 September as free to use for more than 100,000 users and said the company was exploring advertising as a possible source of revenue. The publication also described an architecture that generates dozens of inference calls for each user request. Each call adds to the computing work required to deliver the service.
Users had reported that the service was at full capacity and that responses had slowed. Its account predated the completed Series C. Instinct’s 28 September statement, as reported by Reuters, identified the investors in the new round and the valuation at which the company raised its $1 billion.
