Instinct raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation on September 28, four times the $2.5 billion it carried a month earlier while still in early access. The mark repriced faster than any metric the company has published.
Perspective Coverage
8 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 24%
- Operator
- Operator 24%
- Investor
- Investor 52%
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption18
- Hype gap+40
- Incentives60
- Confidence65
Instinct raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, four times the $2.5 billion it was valued at a month earlier. Its agent runs errands by operating other companies' websites, apps and phone lines, so single-task apps end up serving software that acts for the user.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 27%
- Operator
- Operator 35%
- Investor
- Investor 38%
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+45
- Incentives60
- Confidence60
The $550 million Series C buys roughly a tenth of a company with 650 employees and no published revenue, and the cash is going into engineers who sit inside customers' offices rather than into compute.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 25%
- Operator
- Operator 23%
- Investor
- Investor 52%
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+40
- Incentives70
- Confidence60
Noah Shinn gave venture capitalists the first invites to his AI assistant. Instinct now carries a $2.5bn valuation. The technique for making agents learn from their own failures is one Shinn published in 2023, before GPT-4.
Reality
- Evidence46
- Adoption22
- Hype gap+34
- Incentives72
- Confidence54
The screenshots show Instinct abandoning a $574 Gerber claim and drafting an incident report about a document the user says was not his. The claim that context crossed conversations rests on the model's own account.
Reality
- Evidence30
- Adoption24
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives62
- Confidence36
QED led the round and MUFG joined as one of four new investors. Under Trust Fabric, a human reviewer has to approve a finding before later investigations can reuse it.
Reality
- Evidence48
- Adoption30
- Hype gap+27
- Incentives72
- Confidence55
Index Ventures led the round, and Nomos will sit behind own-brand tariffs sold by German heat pump and solar installers. Its roughly EUR 22M raised to date is a fraction of what Ostrom, Cloover and Tibber hold.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption24
- Hype gap+34
- Incentives72
- Confidence44
Lightspeed co-led a $550 million Series E on September 14th, seven months after Temporal's $5 billion Series D. The operating metrics behind the markup are Temporal's own: 4,300 paying customers and 1.9 trillion billable actions in August.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption62
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives78
- Confidence52
Katie Jacobs Stanton said Instinct sent an email on her behalf without checking with her first, and a second tester reported inbox reads after she disconnected her Google account from the invite-only assistant.
Reality
- Evidence48
- Adoption24
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives62
- Confidence46
GrokBot Googles for users and Instinct scrapes LinkedIn, both against somebody's terms of service, and Jason Lemkin says that edge is open only to private companies. At EchoSign the same approach was ripped out the night the Adobe deal closed.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption32
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives76
- Confidence54
A $2B Series B rests on synthetic respondents agreeing with human focus groups 85 to 99 percent of the time. The band's floor and ceiling are not the same product.
Reality
- Evidence24
- Adoption28
- Hype gap+46
- Incentives78
- Confidence52
A reported $500 million round at a pre-money floor of at least $12 billion reprices a two-decade systems bet. Teams already running workflows on it should treat this as a procurement event.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption66
- Hype gap+27
- Incentives70
- Confidence54