Half of Instinct's Agent Transactions Are Travel
More than 50% of transactions on Instinct are travel-related, founder Noah Shinn said in an interview with investor Patrick O'Shaughnessy. TechCrunch
Shinn described an invite-only platform approaching $1 billion in annualized transaction volume. That means purchases are running at a pace that would total almost $1 billion over a year. He said Instinct is growing 10% day by day, with transaction volume increasing at a similar rate.
Instinct recently raised $1 billion in Series C funding at a $10 billion valuation from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue. The company has 14 employees. It is competing in the personal agent space, a term for AI assistants that can take actions for users, with Meta's Muse and the Khosla-backed Wajo.
Shinn pointed to monitoring tasks that suit an always-on agent. He said an agent can check restaurant sites every five seconds and inform the user about available slots.
Instinct has been extending the agent's ability to act outside chat. On September 9, 2026, TechCrunch reported that Instinct launched an email feature letting its AI agent create and manage accounts, contact businesses, and handle support requests. TechCrunch
Meta describes Muse as a secure, private personal AI agent that proactively helps people meet their goals and suggests ideas. Meta Business Insider separately published a September 2026 test of Instinct's AI agent for planning travel. Business Insider
The broader context here is why travel keeps emerging as the first real workload for personal agents. The same checking pattern fits flights, hotels and reservations, where inventory changes quickly and timing determines outcome. Travel combines organized supply, high comparison cost, split-up booking steps and frequent exceptions. Search gives a list. Booking still requires account creation, preference handling, payment, confirmation tracking and changes. An agent that can hold login details, check for state changes and send email on the user's behalf brings several separate tools into one loop.
For builders, the takeaway is that transaction mix matters more than chat volume. Travel forces handling of payment authorization, cancellation policy, identity verification and merchant-side anti-bot controls, the systems stores use to block automated buying. It also brings latency and reliability demands that demos can avoid. Checking every few seconds is simple in principle. Doing it politely, reliably and with clear audit records across thousands of merchants is infrastructure work.
In my view, the figure above 50% is less a travel story than a signal about delegation. Consumers hand off work when the cost of attention is higher than worries about trust. Travel qualifies. Restaurant reservations and support tickets do too. The work I watched my own children hand off first was not research. It was follow-up. If Instinct keeps anything close to its stated growth rate with that mix, the next limit will be merchant acceptance and dispute handling, not model quality. Agents that transact become the other party in a deal. That allows useful automation, from rebooking during disruptions to catching short-lived availability, as long as logging, limits and revocation stay clear to the user.
