Meet Noah Shinn: The 23-year-old college dropout whose viral AI assistant is emerging as a new challenger to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta

At just 23 years old, Noah Shinn is already making his mark on the AI world.

He founded Instinct, an AI assistant startup, just last year. Since then, its valuation has skyrocketed. The company raised $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation in August, bringing its total raised at the time to $350 million. Just this week, the company raised an additional $1 billion in a Series C that shot its valuation up to $10 billion. 

Even though Instinct’s AI assistant is open only to a select few invitees, Instinct is now approaching $1 billion in annual transaction volume, Shinn said in an interview on the Invest Like the Best podcast published Monday. 

Despite not being broadly available, Instinct has grown organically through word of mouth, Shinn told the podcast host and venture capitalist Patrick O’Shaughnessy. So many people want to join, he said, that existing users are now selling invitations to join Instinct on eBay. 

“We spent $0 on marketing so far,” he said.

What does Instinct do?

Instinct is a free personal assistant powered by AI that can communicate with users via message or a phone call. The assistant launched in private beta in February, The Wall Street Journal reported, but last month opened in an invite-only beta, with each user allotted five invites. It has caught on with people who have used the tool to plan weddings and cancel hundreds of dollars worth of subscriptions, Shinn said in an X post last month. 

The Instinct founder said his personal assistant and others like it have the potential to simplify users’ lives, especially when it comes to travel—a category which makes up half of the billion dollars Shinn said is transacting through the platform on........

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