Noah Shinn, the 23-year-old founder of AI assistant Instinct, and his rapid rise

Business Insider has published a profile of Noah Shinn, the 23-year-old founder of Instinct, an invitation-only AI assistant that spread by word of mouth in Silicon Valley this summer. Shinn did not respond to interview requests; a spokesperson for Instinct confirmed several biographical details.

Research before the company

Shinn grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended Northeastern University, dropping out in 2023. Weeks after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, he answered a LinkedIn post from MIT professor Ashwin Gopinath, who was looking for students to experiment with the new technology. Within three months the group produced a paper presented at NeurIPS about agents that improve by remembering their earlier failures, a technique known as Reflexion. "Virtually zero students can write research papers as undergrads," Northeastern professor Arjun Guha told Business Insider.

An assistant you text

Shinn became one of the first employees at Sierra, the customer-service AI company led by OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, and left in September 2025 to work on Instinct. The product has no app: users text or call it, and it connects to email, calendar and messaging services to book travel, reserve restaurant tables, cancel subscriptions or chase refunds. Early access was invitation-only, and Shinn gave it to venture capitalists first; their posts helped it spread. A Business Insider reporter who tested it described a cabin booked for a birthday and a document faxed to a bank.

The funding numbers

On August 26, in his first public post about the product, Shinn said Instinct had raised $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, on top of about $100 million raised earlier. The round was co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark and reported by The Wall Street Journal; earlier backers include Conviction Partners and Greenoaks. In September, The Information reported the company was in talks to raise roughly $1 billion at a valuation of about $10 billion, with Sequoia Capital and Benchmark in discussions to lead. That round has not been finalised and is separate from the August Series B.

Competing with Meta

Instinct now faces Meta, which tested a personal agent internally called Hatch and launched Muse weeks after Instinct. Meta's computing power and cash outweigh a free product that depends on investor money and sometimes lags under demand; The Information reported Instinct has more than 100,000 users. Business Insider also reported that two of Shinn's investors pulled funding from rival agent startup Town after he complained; Instinct's spokesperson said the company could not confirm the opinions of others.