A newly launched AI assistant is drawing buzz among tech insiders who say it delivers on a long-standing promise: a chatbot capable of booking flights, drafting emails and securing hard-to-get restaurant reservations.
Called Instinct, the startup operates directly within iMessage and WhatsApp instead of requiring users to download a standalone app. The idea is simple: users can send it a message the same way they would text a human personal assistant.
“You can use OpenClaw [a similar product] in iMessage, but they’re clunky experiences — this is the first AI assistant I’ve recommended my wife and kids, who aren’t techies, should use,” said John Borthwick of Betaworks, an early Hugging Face investor who does not hold a stake in Instinct.
The company is reportedly discussing a $1 billion fundraising round that would value it at $10 billion. That figure is more than four times the $2.5 billion valuation investors reportedly assigned to Instinct just a month earlier—an extraordinary jump for a company that launched only in February.
For now, Instinct remains invite-only, a limited rollout that has only heightened interest in the product.
Christopher Rim, CEO of Command Education, said he had previously avoided hiring an assistant because delegating work to another person—and then reviewing and managing that work—often seemed like more effort than handling tasks himself.
“I’m the type of person who likes to just do it on my own,” he told me.
Yet after using Instinct for several weeks, Rim said the service had changed his mind. Once he shared the itinerary for an upcoming Middle East trip, the AI proactively arranged airport car service, a complimentary Emirates first-class benefit he did not know was available to him.
Instinct also contacted his hotel to alert staff to his arrival and proposed changes to his meeting schedule that would create a more efficient route through Dubai, helping him avoid spending the day retracing his path in traffic. In effect, it handled the kind of logistical planning typically assigned to an entire advance team—at no cost.
“It’s insane,” he added.
Borthwick, a top investor, said he likes Instinct because it has found the right voice and cadence with its texts— something which many bots struggle with. People quickly get annoyed and silence or delete apps which overcommunicate or have the wrong tone, research shows.
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Competitors like Poke have unveiled similar products but remain at much smaller valuations, as the market is crowded and cutting through the noise around AI and its adoption is hard.
The only areas Instinct, founded by 23-year-old Noah Shinn, has run into questions about are security and privacy. As with any assistant, product accesses email, messaging, calendar, location, and other data pools — it’s just not clear exactly how much it is storing and what it does with data. Instinct didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Matthew Ammirati, who runs multiple businesses, said he erected guardrails after a few bad experiences with other Large Language Models. “I’m not letting it delete anything,” he said.
He has, however, given Instinct permission to read and write emails. Which has helped him out from under the more than 500 he receives daily.
“It’s giving you the ability to kind of clear your head and focus on the work you actually need to do,” he said.
When I asked Instinct what LLM it uses, it demurred.
It did assure me my data was secure, “Everything stored about you is encrypted at rest, and what gets indexed from your connected accounts (email, calendar, messages) is used only for your experience — never to train models.”
The fact its answer was opaque is enough to give someone pause, although when something works so well, who wants to give it a break?
There’s also a question about what happens when everyone else has a digital assistant acting on their behalf, too.
Resy temporarily deactivated one user’s account after their Instinct assistant tried to book a reservation at 4 Charles in the West Village 200 times in one hour.
Such hiccups aside, there’s a lot Instinct has going for it. From an investment standpoint the service is hot, but the question of whether that enthusiasm for the product justifies a $10 billion price tag, or whether it could be just the latest sign of an AI bubble, remains to be seen.