Founded just one year ago, with only 14 employees, and already valued at $10 billion.
Instinct went viral overnight. What’s surprising is that the person at the helm is a Gen Z founder—Noah Shinn, who just turned 23. He dropped out of Northeastern University three years ago and went on to build Instinct, a personal agent, with his team. The product now processes over $1 billion in transactions annually.
In a stunning announcement, Shinn recently said the company had raised another $1 billion in a round co-led by Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue, bringing its post-money valuation to $10 billion (about 67 billion yuan).
Imagine you’re traveling to Shanghai on business. All you have to do is send a voice message, and your AI assistant will automatically detect your location, book flights and a hotel, and add everything to your calendar. “This opens the door to a market worth trillions of dollars,” Shinn says, making no secret of his excitement about the future of personal agents.
It’s hard not to marvel at the unexpected entrepreneurial legends emerging in the AI era.
Gen Z’s Hottest Founder
Age 23, Valued at $67 Billion
The story begins with a Gen Z college dropout.
Founder Noah Shinn is 23. He dropped out of Northeastern University in 2023, where he studied chemistry and computer science and took part in research on machine learning and large language models. He later joined AI unicorn Sierra as an early core employee, gaining experience in AI development and deployment.
Noah Shinn
Sierra’s AI products mainly handle customer service workflows for businesses. During his time there, Shinn gradually realized that agents were already at work in the business world, but everyday consumers had nothing comparable. So in 2025, he left to found Spear Street Technology and build Instinct, a personal AI assistant.
“When we first experienced ChatGPT in early 2023, we already had a clear vision of how AI should ideally take action,” Shinn says. The agent, he believes, should help with all aspects of daily life and manage the many details of a person’s busy schedule.
Instinct’s design is unusual: it has no standalone app. Users interact with it via text message, phone, or email, and it automatically handles shopping, appointments, travel, and email. If something urgent needs attention, it can even call to remind you.
For example, a user can simply send a voice message saying, “I need to be in Beijing tonight.” Instinct will automatically detect their current location, book a flight based on their preferred airline and seat type, arrange a hotel and airport transfer, and add everything to their calendar—all in one seamless process.
Instinct creates a “Trusted Network” for each user. Colleagues can access only work calendars and selected inbox content, while family members can be given access to more information. Different Instinct agents can also work together on related tasks, with support for sharing PDFs, images, spreadsheets, and more.
At first, the team distributed the product to around 200 friends and family. Each user received five invite codes, and the user base soon began growing by about 10% day over day. Some people even listed their codes on eBay, where prices reached as high as $300.
Shinn wants Instinct to use a business model similar to Apple Pay: users access it for free, while merchants pay a service fee on each transaction. That way, the agent won’t recommend things users don’t need just to serve advertisers.
Although the product is still invite-only, its commercial scale is already substantial. Noah Shinn revealed in an interview that while its user base remains very small, “the annual transaction volume processed by the product is already approaching—and has surpassed—$1 billion.”
14 Employees
The Rise of the Personal Agent Era
Instinct rose to prominence almost overnight.
Early this year, the company raised a seed round led by Conviction, with participation from Greenoaks, at a valuation of $50 million.
In August, Instinct first raised $75 million in a Series A at a $500 million valuation. Later that month, it raised another $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, in a round co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark.
Most recently, it completed a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation. Its valuation skyrocketed in just a few months, while the team still had only 14 people.
“This could be the most exciting software race ever, and the end result is a market worth trillions of dollars,” Shinn said confidently in an interview. Instinct isn’t alone: Silicon Valley started betting on personal agents early on.
One landmark moment came when Meta’s AI assistant Muse burst onto the scene and quickly topped Apple’s App Store charts. Like Instinct, Muse can read emails, calendars, and files, buy products and book trips with a single tap, or keep working on tasks in the background.
Just how popular is Muse? It surpassed 730,000 downloads in only five days, with daily active users far outpacing ChatGPT’s numbers at the time. Meta, which had rarely been at the center of AI conversations, saw its stock rise by more than 20% at one point, adding $200 billion to its market value.
“Most AI agents in the past were aimed at developers and tech enthusiasts, with almost no practical use cases for ordinary people. Muse has made the widespread adoption of AI agents a real possibility,” said an overseas analyst.
Not long ago, OpenAI unveiled dots, an always-on personal agent, at its developer conference. It has its own cloud computer and browser, and can write and test code. Grok Bot, launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX in August, has quietly reached 2.2 million downloads worldwide. Alphabet has just revived and upgraded its experimental AI agent, CC, while ByteDance’s Doubao is also developing products in the personal assistant space.
If traditional large language models mainly interact through question and answer, AI agents go a step further and execute tasks directly. Imagine AI handling flight and hotel bookings, shopping, and restaurant reservations for you. Giving an agent the authority to act as your personal concierge is tantamount to handing it the keys to consumer commerce.
Of course, the controversy is just as intense. To entrust an agent with every aspect of your real life, users must grant it deep access to highly private data—email, calendars, personal accounts, even location. The risks are obvious.
“It’s all so new. No product has fully earned people’s trust yet,” one investor admitted. But the industry’s wave is already here.
The AI Era
Gen Z Is Taking Over the Billionaire List
Look around, and Gen Z faces stand out in the AI era.
Not long ago, AI voice company Fish Audio announced a $52 million seed round, co-led by Xu Xin’s Capital Today and Coreline Ventures. Behind the company is a Gen Z founder who started the AI voice project in his bedroom.
A little earlier, SpaceX acquired Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor, for $60 billion, making its early founding team wealthy overnight. Anysphere was founded by four Gen Z students from MIT, and its product Cursor has become the world’s hottest AI coding tool.
Back in China, Gen Z founders are just as ubiquitous. Magic Atom, a 4D world-model company founded by Zhejiang University alumnus Chen Tianrun, is about to close a new funding round, lifting its valuation to nearly 10 billion yuan. LiberAI, a world-model company led by Liu Songming, a Gen Z Tsinghua doctoral student, has completed a new, several-hundred-million-yuan Pre-A++ round—and the list keeps growing.
A closer look reveals a strikingly consistent profile: these young founders come from elite universities such as Tsinghua, Stanford, and Yale. They started projects while still in school, building up resources and technical expertise. They are flocking to cutting-edge fields like AI, robotics, and world models, where rapid experimentation and iterative entrepreneurship have become the norm.
Even their approach to entrepreneurship is much the same: drawing on their own observations and experience, they start with a small, focused problem that affects everyday life, then quickly amplify their impact with AI. Rather than relying on traditional resources, they define problems flexibly, wield tools effectively, and bring the results together.
Without their companies, they might only just have graduated from college. In Forbes’ recently released “World’s Youngest Billionaires of 2026” list, the three co-founders of AI recruiting startup Mercor were just 22 years old, each with a fortune of $2.2 billion—equivalent to gaining $100 million in wealth for every year of their lives.
“The AI era belongs to Gen Z”—it’s a refrain often heard in venture capital circles. Having grown up amid the boom in large language models and the maturation of open-source ecosystems, they aren’t bound by the mobile internet’s established playbook or conventional business logic. They have an instinct for emerging fields that older generations simply can’t replicate.
As technology evolves at breakneck speed, they have skipped the long process of building industry experience and leaped straight to the top of the capital pyramid. According to data Forbes released in March, a record 35 people under 30 have amassed fortunes of at least $1 billion.
When ChatGPT and DeepSeek burst onto the scene, the value of technological leverage was reassessed. Rather than spending years building up experience before stepping into the public eye, young entrepreneurs are eager to dive in—and fortunes are rapidly taking shape in the wake of the AI revolution.
Every generation eventually comes ashore, but there are always people who choose to set sail. $SOL
