Instinct is a personal artificial intelligence agent developed by Spear Street Technology, Inc., a San Francisco-based startup founded by Noah Shinn. The agent is reached by text message or phone call rather than through a dedicated app. As of September 2026 the product is in an invite-only private access programme.
History Spear Street Technology was registered in California in April 2026 by Noah Shinn, a 23-year-old former research scientist at Sierra, the customer-service AI company co-founded by Bret Taylor. Shinn had left Northeastern University in 2023 after machine-learning research at Northeastern and MIT, and is known as the first author of Reflexion, a NeurIPS 2023 paper on agents that learn from their own mistakes by storing summaries of past failures as memory.
The company operated in stealth during its first months, while the agent spread by word of mouth among beta users in Silicon Valley over the summer of 2026. Investor Sheel Mohnot described it as "OpenClaw for normal people". Shinn introduced the product publicly for the first time on 26 August 2026, the same day Instinct disclosed its $250 million Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark at a $2.5 billion post-money valuation, bringing total funding to $350 million.
Reception While some testers praised the agent's capability, coverage of the launch also highlighted privacy and security concerns. In August 2026 TechCrunch reported that Instinct's terms of service grant the company a perpetual and irrevocable licence to user data, including screen captures and keystrokes, which may be used for model training.
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