Instinct founder Noah Shinn stated on the Invest Like the Best program that his personal goal is to provide this personal assistant free for life to everyone; the platform is approaching an annual transaction volume of about $1 billion, with approximately 50% coming from travel, where users do not pay, and benefiting merchants cover the distribution costs.

The product is invitation-only, with no standalone app; users issue tasks via SMS, voice, or email, and the assistant operates computers and phones in the cloud to complete bookings, hotel reservations, ride-hailing, and calendar entries. Shinn mentioned that marketing expenses are zero, with about 10% daily user growth, and invitations are transferable among users, with transactions on eBay reaching about $300. Within about three weeks, 40% of users linked their personal credit cards, and retention increased to about 80% after linking. More than half of the traffic does not go through iMessage. The company is based in San Francisco under Spear Street Technology, and Shinn previously conducted research at Sierra and participated in the Reflexion paper.

The business model is compared to Apple Pay and American Express: a unified transaction commission, exchanging distribution for merchant access. He cited existing ranges: Shopify around 2.5% to 3%, Amazon up to about 10%, and Apple’s in-app purchases at 30%; airline ticket commissions are usually single digits, while boutique hotels can offer around 30% for customer referrals. He does not promise to achieve 30%, but believes that the travel proportion has proven high commission verticals exist, and he wants to apply the same logic to more industries. The company is currently still in a phase of not charging users and has not monetized transaction volume.

The financing pace has been compressed to a few weeks. In August, a $250 million Series B round was raised at a valuation of about $2.5 billion, led jointly by Index and Benchmark; in September, a $1 billion Series C round was reported, with a valuation of about $10 billion, involving Sequoia, Benchmark, Coatue, etc., bringing total disclosed financing to about $1.35 billion. The demand for computing power is said to double weekly, with Shinn spending about 40% of his time on computing power, with temporary purchases costing three to four times more, and background tasks achieving three, five, or eight times the efficiency on the same computing power. The company’s A/B testing claims it can approach Opus 5 performance at a lower cost.

Use cases include a voice command to book a flight to New York for the same night, seat selection, meal choice, card selection, hotel, round-trip ride-hailing, and calendar entry; evaluations included long-distance check-in and boarding pass push notifications across three airlines. Early users also used it for food ordering, subscription cancellations, concert tickets, wedding planning, and investor data rooms. The target audience is founders, investors, and executives who might hire personal assistants. Invitations start from about 200 friends and family.

In market mechanics, this is about harvesting the software interface into a chat entry point, then taxing transactions after the entry. The buyers are high-net-worth invite users willing to hand over their credit cards to the assistant; Instinct sells order distribution, not subscriptions. Funds flow from hotels and airlines' customer acquisition budgets to the assistant platform. Beneficiaries are boutique hotels and high-commission merchants that can be ordered with one click; the pressured parties are online travel agencies, booking buttons, and apps that rely on advertising for retention. If the commission is not unified, the assistant will encounter the same conflicts of interest as OTAs: those offering higher commissions will be recommended more easily.

Supplementary data: According to the host, if daily growth maintains at 5% to 8% and survives the new computing power rollout period, users could reach about 100 million, which is an extrapolation, not a guideline. The total fee rate on payment tracks is about 2% to 2.5%, which he excludes from pursuit targets. Some analyses estimate that with 80% of hotels in the travel industry and a 10% commission, the theoretical commission on $1 billion in transaction volume would be tens of millions of dollars, provided that users place all orders through the platform rather than redirecting to official websites.

Source: Public Information