23-Year-Old Dropout's Instinct AI Raises $1B, Valued at $10B as Meta Feud Escalates

Noah Shinn, a 23-year-old college dropout, has turned his invite-only AI assistant startup Instinct into a $10 billion company after raising $1 billion in a Series C funding round this week. The raise follows a $250 million round in August at a $2.5 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $1.35 billion in under two years.

The rapid ascent comes despite Instinct remaining largely inaccessible to the public. The AI assistant is available only through invitations, with each user allotted five invites. Shinn said on the Invest Like the Best podcast published Monday that the company has spent nothing on marketing, relying instead on organic word-of-mouth growth. Demand has grown so intense that existing users are selling invitations on eBay, he said.

Instinct is a free personal assistant powered by AI that communicates with users via message or phone call. It launched in private beta in February and expanded to an invite-only beta last month. Shinn said users have employed the tool to plan weddings and cancel hundreds of dollars in subscriptions. Travel accounts for roughly half of the nearly $1 billion in annual transaction volume flowing through the platform, he said, with the assistant learning user preferences and storing them in memory to simplify future bookings.

The startup has drawn attention from Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, who has repeatedly mocked Instinct on X since Meta announced its own personal AI agent, Muse, earlier this month. Wang said Muse would beat Instinct in an MMA match, called Muse «way hotter» and «way faster» than competing personal agents, and wrote «Muse absolutely crushes Insect,» mocking the startup's name. Shinn reportedly responded to one post with a smiley face. Combined, Wang's posts drew hundreds of thousands of views and more than 1,000 likes, potentially giving Instinct an unintended marketing boost.

Meta's Muse has already attracted a massive following, recently replacing ChatGPT as the top free app on the U.S. App Store. Market intelligence provider Apptopia estimated Muse saw 2.8 million installs worldwide in its first 12 days, according to TechCrunch. It remains unclear how many users Instinct has, though Shinn said he spends «very little of my time thinking about competition and other players in the space.» He called Muse a great product and said the potential for growth remains huge because many people are not using AI to its highest potential.

Shinn grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended a private high school in San Jose, where he played basketball and ran cross country. He enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston but left in 2023 to join the startup world. Before dropping out, he worked on type prediction and code generation in Northeastern's Programming Language Group, researched excited-state molecular dynamics in its Computational Photochemistry Group, and was a member of the avionics team in the student-run aerospace organization.

He established himself as a serious AI researcher by authoring a paper as an undergraduate with then-MIT professor Ashwin Gopinath titled «Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning.» The paper explored how AI agents could learn from previous responses by reflecting on feedback and storing data in memory. Shinn and his co-authors used the approach to get a large language model to achieve 91% accuracy on a coding evaluation, compared to 80% with GPT-4. The paper has been cited hundreds of times, including by Google DeepMind.

Neither Instinct nor Meta immediately replied to requests for comment. The competition between the two companies highlights the intensifying race to build personal AI agents that can manage everyday tasks, from travel planning to subscription management, as major tech firms and well-funded startups vie for user attention and transaction volume.

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Caroline Mercer

World News Correspondent

Caroline Mercer covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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