My boyfriend and I got on the Jumbotron last night at the US Open and he wanted the footage. I told him impossible but I’ll ask Instinct bc why not. And of course, Instinct got us the video in 18 hours. Here's what it did (1/5)

SCOOP: Concerns from Instinct over conflicts have knocked Index Ventures out of leading a new round for fellow AI assistant startup Town. Town is now moving forward with a $90M raise at $1B co-led by two other firms, sources tell me at @UpstartsMediaCo. t.co/a8FP9pLNfx

Friend : “the personal agent consumer space is Apple’s to lose. Products like Instinct are great right now, but Apple default knows all your contacts, who you text most frequently, which apps are on your phone, has your location at all times, and payments are integrated into the device, to say nothing of the obvious Apple Watch integrations. Nobody else comes close to this depth and breadth of context about you” Me: “You must be new here. Have you tried using ‘Search’ in iMessage lately?”

this and not knowing what instinct is

Instinct is booking you a doctor’s appointment Instinct is finding the best, nearest, and cheapest doctor, checking my schedule, booking the right slot, and even cancelling the appointment for me if plans change we are not the same

Swiggy shipped the AI personal assistant idea 16 months before Silicon Valley. April 2025: Crew. Invite-only. Book the table, renew the Aadhaar, plan the trip, source the gift. ₹999 for three months. August 2026: Instinct — one year old, no fleet, no concierge desk, still in private beta — raises $350M at $2.5B. A third of Swiggy's entire market cap. Same insight. Completely different asset. Crew hired the assistant. Instinct built it using AI. If Swiggy could have built the AI-native version, it might soon be worth more than their core business. Both of them have very similar vision, just different execution. The idea was never the moat; it is the execution and how AI native the platform is.

This podcast is the single most important podcast to know what is going on in tech every week. On the agenda this week: - NVIDIA Crushes Quarter and Buys Hugging Face - OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor - Instinct Hits $2.5BN Valuation and The Race for AI Assistants - Cognition Raises at $46BN, Linear $2.5BN and Clay $7BN My notes with @rodriscoll and @jasonlk below: 1. How Instinct Could Follow the Same Path as Replit and Lovable In the early days, cloning lightweight AI tools is trivial. Defensibility emerges by rapidly adding complex workflows like security automation and multi-agent orchestration. Products that start without a moat can build formidable ones over time by solving dozens of evolving customer requirements faster than anyone else. 2. Hugging Face Acquisition Explained As the maker of compute, NVIDIA benefits when AI token traffic flows through 30% gross-margin open-source models rather than 70% gross-margin closed models where platforms capture more of the economics. Driving down software margins allows a greater share of total ecosystem spend to flow directly into GPUs. 3. The Bull Case for Clay Being a $100 Billion Company Autonomous agents executing go-to-market strategies around the clock could consume 10x to 100x more tokens and software usage than human sales teams ever could. As a leader in agentic GTM, Clay is positioned to capture an enormous wave of automated outreach, campaign analysis, and global prospect engagement. 4. The Bull Case for Linear When software teams build 100x more features at 50x the speed using AI, legacy project management tools and manual Kanban boards begin to break down. Linear can become the agent-friendly system of record for coordinating, tracking, and managing thousands of issues generated simultaneously by human-agent development teams. 5. The Three Ways the Wheels Come Off the Bus for NVIDIA NVIDIA’s record-breaking momentum faces one fundamental existential threat: a sudden collapse in end-user demand for AI intelligence. Hyperscaler CapEx buildouts and complex vendor financing arrangements work only as long as customers continue aggressively buying frontier-model tokens throughout the supply chain. 6. We Are All Building Compound Startups Today AI development tools have accelerated code production dramatically, making narrow point solutions increasingly vulnerable. To survive rapid competitive convergence, software startups must embrace becoming compound companies that ship expansive, multi-module product suites covering the entire customer workflow. 7. We Did Not End Up Doing More With Less. We Did More With More, and That’s Why European Startups Fail The belief that AI would allow companies to shrink headcount and simply do more with less has not played out as expected. Winners are compounding capital and talent to do vastly more with more, putting underfunded point solutions, particularly across Europe, at risk of being overwhelmed by aggressively scaling U.S. competitors. (links in comments)

i'm looking to interview/speak to 100 people who're using any one of these regularly in their workflows: 1. openclaw 2. hermes 3. grokbot 4. claude cowork 5. chatgpt work 6. instinct comment below "agent" and I'll dm you to setup a call.

Instinct saved me ₹61k in cloud bills. In may one of my Gemini api keys leaked and someone started abusing it. Overnight the key was used to generate 1.5M images and tens of millions of text tokens. Way beyond my usage patterns. I didn’t know about it, despite putting billing alerts and usage limits. My credit card kept getting hit with this 61k charge. But thankfully I’d already put limits on my card too. But Google cloud kept emailing me for the unpaid bill. If you’ve ever gone though GCP console, you’ll know it’s a sea of buttons and jargon, and it’s easy to get lost. I tried to find the bill, couldn’t find it. Tried looking for the unpaid bill, nothing shows up. I start ignoring these GCP emails Recently I connected my Google account to instinct and in its initial scan it said this email’s showing up, it can have a look at it. I gave it a go ahead, it found this abused api key and abnormal usage, said it’ll draft the dispute claim, send it to GCP and follow up if there’s any queries. Lo and behold, 48 hours later GCP replied, 61k waived. GCP being kind too. Mind is blown.

How Instinct could follow the same path as Replit and Lovable “When these products came out, they were all built in a month. It was so easy to clone these products in the early days and do nothing. Now they are so complicated. Replit and Lovable of a year ago were not a moat. Today they have massive moats. If Instinct is going to do what we claim it does, in a year it has got to do 100 times more than it does today. All the use cases it has to accomplish become a moat.” @jasonlk Love to hear your thoughts @sarahtavel @nabeelqu @danshipper @gregisenberg

hosted a bunch of moms this morning for tea + meditation + instinct onboarding I think I accidentally reinvented the tupperware party convinced the consumer AI company that figures out how to spread through moms living rooms will win

I’ve been giving Instinct (and @TownAI) a run and they are both excellent. But I also sense a turning point in that both products are heavily messaging driven. There’s no app, no website, it’s just an assistant that lives in your iMessage and WhatsApp. On the one hand, this is dead simple and delivers value instantly. But both are on platforms they don’t really control. For example, I can’t add Instinct to a WhatsApp chat because @Meta doesn’t allow that. The iMessage App Store hasn’t gone anywhere, and it can’t be long before @Apple starts looking for ways to monetize agent subscriptions. Or build their own. how this plays out

"To be clear, our friends at Newcomer didn’t have the initial story wrong, our own sources say: this was an about-face that is unusual for such a buzzy round and major investors involved. We get into means for each startup — and the developing AI assistant race — in more detail below." Always reassuring to read! Source is telling me Alex is right here. Forerunner and Menlo replacing Index as leads on the $1B Town round after Index backed potential rival Instinct. Drama!

Claude just writes your code. Instinct writes the email, books the call, and follows up when they ghost you AND my entire family is using it. THE best personal AI assistant in the market right now.

Instinct is a great digital product. But unlike Swiggy (or booking, or whatever platform it transacts on…), it doesn’t take liability or provide you with support when things go down. It’s only a glorified bridge between you and these platforms. Will it command the lead-gen / origination value on business it brings to other platforms? Sure. But it’ll likely never eat up the entire margin stack because fulfilment and support is where the pain per dollar is high.

The "magic" that everyone has been feeling from personal AI assistants like Instinct is the punchline of the new Open AI model Can't wait to play around with this! t.co/3fgOYOkAkD

This week's hottest AI startup rounds on Industry News with @sophiadew: -Instinct AI raised $250M series B at $2.5B -Owner raised $240M at $2.3B led by @GoldmanSachs, crossing $100M ARR - putting site, ordering, POS and CRM in one stack for independent restaurants -@Gatik_AI raised $200M Series D for driverless box trucks, with $600M in contracted revenue and a multi-year @PepsiCo deal -Socure hit a $5.2B valuation led by @SummitPartners and is acquiring Fravity for agentic fraud work -Emerald AI raised $150M at $1.05B, backed by @nvidia, to make data centers flexible loads on the power grid -AI Money Assistant Felix raised $87M equity from @a16z plus $113M debt from @gcvp - an AI money assistant for Latino remittances, already $8B moved across 6M people -@StabilityAI raised $76M backed by @UMG, @WMG, @EA and @AMD -Alice, formerly Active Defense, raised $140M to build trust and safety around AI models — already working with 8 of the top 10 labs -@air__security out of stealth with $50M from @sequoia and Greenoaks, building a firewall for AI agents -Physical Superintelligence raised a $58M seed from Breakthrough Energy Ventures for an AI-native physics lab

The day Instinct (or apps like it) can smoothly navigate Govt. websites (EPFO, for eg.) is the day AI wins.

I'm now 0/3 on agentic commerce in the last week. Grok Bot couldn't pay for an airport pick-up in Rome, Grok Bot couldn't buy a Jungle Brothers vinyl record in the UK... so I tried Instinct.. it failed too. Sad face. I HAVE SO MANY THINGS I WANT MY AGENTS TO BUY.

been a poke loyalist for ages but it’s been tweaking for no reason lately :/ may have to move to instinct

anybody here on instinct? im cooking something up, want an invite. coffee on me

I hope this email finds you and your Instinct bot that is reading our message well

Do you know of more startups in this AI assistant category getting attention or funding? Are the VCs subtweeting about karma today vagueposting about the Instinct / Town we scooped? DMs are open t.co/DZyTkn7PzG

Sources: Index Ventures dropped plans to invest in AI assistant Town after Instinct, which Index is backing, complained about a potential conflict of interest (@alexrkonrad / Upstarts Media) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

ok yea this thing sucks can someone dm an instinct invite code t.co/IroCsN9Kdn

people are (rightfully) afraid to connect their email/personal accounts to Instinct or other AI systems here are the top things I'm still seeing people do even without email 1/ flights is the golden goose: search, track prices, watch for drops 2/ reminders: tell me if X happens or remind me tomorrow to... 3/ personal CRM: send messages of who you met, what they do, and it will remember 4/ personal shopper: send a picture of an outfit or something you want to buy, it will find the merch and purchase for you (via Link) 5/ purchase movie tickets (again via Link)

instinct raised $40M to book dinner reservations over text helena runs your ads, email, SEO, and content from iMessage. bootstrapped this is what solo founders like me actually need t.co/F41BGVDge1

instinct is the best ai assistant to date, it's writing is superb and has been super useful helping me think through event admin work

lowkey love having instinct as my shopping assistant

LIVE: - Reviewing Startups - Reading @noahrshinn's AI Research for Instinct - Reactions to @OpenAI Astra Join up: t.co/3QSHqwnKEi t.co/lGIbaXK0iF

Cool proactive agent experience: I shared my location with Instinct while traveling and asked it to flag points of interest, vistas, and good food spots near me as I walked around. Loc data is a bit delayed but other than that not bad! Also had it figure out public transit and directions. As a result I spent a lot less time fighting Google Maps with limited connectivity. Actually ended up looking at my phone a lot less

Finally got access to Instinct. No impressed. Overhyped by VCs. Any agent out there will yield similiar results. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

idk what instinct is and i am gonna stay in that bubble thanks

one of my fave use cases for using instinct. the read angellist➞write into notion was fast. additionally, as redacting on mobile is tedious, after screenshotting, I voicenoted instinct, requesting sensitive info be redacted. Voila

Websites spent a decade blocking bots. Next decade winners will *invite* agents in — clean APIs, agent auth, one-click checkout. My Instinct agent did the research again but couldn’t finish the buy. That friction is the opportunity.

We got a sneak peek at what Instinct has to offer. @puneetiitm: “It’s very proactive. If you connect a system to it, it’ll actually send you a message saying, ‘This thing is coming up. Be ready.’” “It’s actually great at doing e-commerce. I’ve tried to send flowers to my friend and shop for my 18-month-old child using Instinct, and it gets to the cart creation page very easily.” “I think the payment is still something that needs to be solved.”

I think Jyoti’s reporting is fantastic. That said, when I’ve used tools such as Instinct in the past, a simple “please check with me prior to any purchases or emails sent” did the trick in terms of maintaining control. t.co/jUeWBKxO1a

You're still using Instinct ? You haven't tried Swiggy? You're soooooooooooo fucked t.co/aHOlWzO1VC

Instinct is pretty good till it's not. Relying on close source personal agents is incredibly risky and a lot of people will get burnt. > no idea how things happen in the backend (hard to know what works and what does not) > It's hard to trust a black box product e.g. reminders not firing up etc. > what if one day the products shuts down or 10x prices? you lose all the prompts/connections/cron jobs etc I overall like Instict but Hermes agent (@NousResearch) with @PhotonHQ on a mac mini gets very very close + you own the brain.

I think the next big AI moat is not intelligence. It's context. Instinct just does what it does. It connected my GitHub, Slack, Linear, email, and Granola, then made my work feel 10x less overwhelming by showing me what actually matters next. Nothing it does is impossible with Claude or Hermes. But when the context is already there, the experience feels completely different.