# Instinct Quadruples to a Ten Billion Valuation While Higgsfield Reaches a Billion in Revenue - The Raise - Week of Sep 28–Oct 4, 2026 > The Raise for the week of Sep 28 to Oct 4, 2026. Podcast synthesis on Instinct's $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation one month after a $2.5 billion round, Harvey, Crusoe, Qera, Nex and Subconscious rounds, the AMD acquisition of Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, Oura's pulled IPO and the Anthropic filing leak, plus a founder story on Higgsfield going from $1 million to $1 billion in annualized revenue in 18 months. ## The Raise ### Week of Sep 28–Oct 4, 2026: Instinct Quadruples to a Ten Billion Valuation While Higgsfield Reaches a Billion in Revenue --- *This week: Instinct quadrupled its valuation in a month to $10 billion, and its own lead investor calls that an "early stage" bet. Harvey raised again, Crusoe hit $30.9 billion, and the IPO window flinched when Oura pulled its listing. Our founder story is Higgsfield, a team from Kazakhstan that burned most of a $16 million seed, nearly ran out of money, and then went from $1 million to $1 billion in annualized revenue in 18 months.* On Monday, September 28th, Brian McCullough opened Tech Brew Ride Home with a list of the day's news: Starship reached orbit, Nvidia ($NVDA) shipped an AI agent safety platform, Meta ($META) launched an enterprise AI business. And, almost as an aside, "Instinct raised $1 billion." Here are the details. Instinct makes a personal AI agent. It plans road trips, orders groceries, cancels subscriptions you forgot about, and now even makes phone calls for you to book restaurants or sort out bills. It raised a *$1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation* from Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue. Tech Brew pointed out that this came *one month* after a $250 million round, co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, that valued the company at $2.5 billion. The founder, Noah Shin, said: > "We're building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life" Harry Stebbings put it bluntly on 20VC's Wednesday news show: a "23 year old founder" raising "a billion at 10 billion." Then the conversation got really interesting, because Jack Altman of Benchmark was sitting in, and Benchmark led the deal: > "Yeah, we did. My partners, Peter and Ev, led it and we were all extremely excited about it." Rory O'Driscoll of Scale Venture Partners has known Benchmark since 1995. Benchmark is famous for staying small and early-stage, so he teased Altman about the firm finally embracing big late-stage checks: > "It's 10 billion pre pre revenue, big ass check. Like no mincy little, little steps here. It's all in on day one." ("Pre" here means the valuation before the new money comes in. "Pre-revenue" means Instinct isn't really charging anyone yet.) What stuck with me was Altman's answer. Benchmark invested at $2.5 billion and again at $10 billion, and he says the firm still sees this as a seed-style bet: > "we invested first at two and a half and 10. And what's funny is in our minds, it was actually kind of an early stage investment. And I know that sounds psychotic." > "is this a growth investment because it was billions of dollars of valuation? Or is this an early-stage investment because it's like nine days old? And both are kind of true." I give him credit for saying it out loud. But look at what it means. If a $10 billion check counts as "early stage," the normal tools for judging a price no longer apply. You can't compare a nine-day-old product to public companies' revenue multiples. So you fall back on the logic Rory summed up for him: if this matters, it'll matter a lot. Rory also did the boring math nobody else wanted to do. Most Americans fly once or twice a year and rarely book fine dining. Benchmark also backed OpenTable, which is roughly a billion-dollar business today. So: > "You'll be pretty bummed if you're only doing a billion dollars in restaurant bookings on Instinct." Jason Lemkin of SaaStr asked the question I think actually decides this. He runs 22 AI agents himself, but the AI products that won (coding tools, legal tools like Harvey) are the ones people use all day: > "Will we run instinct to muse eight hours a day? If we do, I guarantee it wins." "Muse" is Meta's competing assistant, run by Alex Wang. That's the other half of this story. Instinct isn't just raising money; it's going straight at Mark Zuckerberg. Here's my view. I don't think the $10 billion price is the scary part. Harry made the same point, and he named the real worry better than I could: > "What worries me is when you have three rounds in three weeks with no material movement in between and no data suggests there's been anything different. That's what worries me." That's exactly what happened with TypeSafe and Jev last week (more on that below). Instinct at least has usage that people describe as remarkable. Harry admitted he now "just live[s]" his life through it instead of ChatGPT. But the pattern of round after round with nothing new in between is spreading, and the investors doing it know it. Altman said: > "We are either investing way too fast or way too slow. But when both sides of the equation are this out of whack, the odds of having it right are zero." Rory added a line from the economist Tyler Cowen, who spoke at his firm's annual meeting and was asked about the future of venture capital: > "returns are going to be highly skewed. Variance is going to go up with AI and many of you will fail." Keep that in your head as you read this week's rounds. Then read the founder story. Higgsfield had nothing handed to it. ## This Week's Rounds * *Instinct: $1B Series C at a $10B valuation, from Sequoia, Benchmark (lead, per Jack Altman) and Coatue.* It builds a personal AI agent that does tasks for you (travel, groceries, subscriptions, phone calls) instead of just chatting. It came one month after a $250M round at $2.5B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. On 20VC, Harry estimated the company has "only raised like a billion and a half" in total and argued there's downside protection, because a big tech company would likely buy it if it stalls. Rory's comeback: if you really believe in "50x upside, 1x downside," the textbook bet size would be 30% of your fund. Nobody on the panel would actually do that. *Tech Brew Ride Home, "Starship Reaches Orbit For The First Time" (2026-09-28); 20VC, "Instinct Raises $1B at $10B Valuation | AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B..." (2026-10-01)* * *Harvey: $550M at a $15B valuation.* It makes AI for lawyers. LawNext recorded on the day Harvey announced the round. The guest called Harvey's and Legora's revenue growth "exceptionally impressive." He also raised the obvious risk: if OpenAI or Anthropic ever focus fully on legal, then *"like $550 million is sort of objectively a lot of money, but it's actually not that much money to an OpenAI or an Anthropic"*. *LawNext, "'The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done': Noah Waisberg on Why Selling a Business Hurts, and How Zuva Aims to Fix It" (2026-10-01)* * *Crusoe: $3.9B Series F at a $30.9B valuation.* Crusoe builds AI data centers, rents out the computing power inside them, and runs AI models for customers. Harry called those "three of the most valuable pillars" of the AI supply chain. On the show, CEO Chase Lochmiller said Crusoe writes off its chips over six years, which he called standard across the industry. (Writing off, or "depreciating," means spreading a chip's cost over the years it's expected to stay useful. Critics argue that six years is too generous for AI chips.) He also said the company is "probably better off in the public markets" eventually, but gave no timeline. *20VC, "The Future of Datacentres... with Chase Lochmiller" (2026-10-03)* * *Qera: $230M+ financing, led by Google Quantum AI ($GOOGL) and SoftBank, with Nvidia ($NVDA) participating.* It's a quantum computing company. The host's point: in 2022 the conventional wisdom was that early quantum investing would stay with specialist VCs who could judge the science. Now big tech and the giant platform funds are showing up in the shareholder lists. *The New Quantum Era, "Quantum Venture Investing from the Lab to the Market with Marie Lepske" (2026-09-28)* * *Nex: $150M "to bring it global."* Nex makes a motion-tracking family game console about the size of a Steam Machine, with a games subscription. Virtual Economy's hosts said it was "one of last year's hottest Christmas gifts" and is now sold at Costco, Sam's Club, Target, Walmart and Best Buy. *Virtual Economy, "Ex-Box" (2026-09-30)* * *Subconscious: $5.1M seed, led by MassVentures, with Foothill Ventures as co-lead.* Underscore VC, E14 Fund, Oak Seed Ventures and the Agent Fund also joined. It's a Boston startup that helps companies run open-weight AI models (models whose code anyone can download and run) "up to 80% cheaper." CEO Jack O'Brien said they raised months ago and announced it quietly. The money splits evenly between people and computing power: *"we're spending roughly the same amount on really talented, you know, expensive people as we are on, uh, on GPUs right now."* *The VentureFizz Podcast, "Episode 446: Jack O'Brien - CEO & Co-Founder, Subconscious" (2026-09-28)* * *Also on the 20VC wire (mentioned, not discussed in depth):* Harry said Modal had tripled to a $15B valuation and Baseten was in talks at $26B. Both companies run AI models for other businesses, a category known as "inference." Jack Altman's take: for the last 18 months, *"the correct answer was just keep buying inference."* *20VC (2026-10-01)* ## Founder Story of the Week ### Higgsfield: $16 Million In, $10 Million Burned, One Shot Left. Then $1 Billion. Most founder stories on podcasts are tidy. Alex Mashrabov's, on 20VC on September 28th, isn't. He spends a lot of the hour admitting what he got wrong. *The beginning.* Mashrabov's father is from Uzbekistan, where, he says, a family of five earning $1,000 a month counts as wealthy. Both parents were mechanical engineering professors: > "since I was eight, my parents told me that I must get to the United States because this is the place where technology matters." His mother worked three jobs so he could travel to programming competitions, and his father went with him to every camp. By 19 he was top three in the world in competitive programming (and, as an aside, top three in checkers). He skipped academia for startups. *The first company, and the first lesson in how investors work.* In 2018 he met Mahi, now his Higgsfield co-founder, and they built AI Factory, which sold to Snap ($SNAP) for *$166 million*. It sounds like a big win. But this was before AI was fashionable, and the small rounds of the time came at a cost: > "there was like severe dilution, which we experienced." ("Dilution" means founders' ownership shrinks every time new shares are sold to investors.) Back then, he said, raising $1 million to $2 million was considered "really good." What did he do with his money from the sale? *"Whenever we sold the company, I made over a million dollars. And I spent all this money buying apartments for my parents, relatives, my wife, parents, because it's just part of the culture."* He drives a Tesla Model 3 and doesn't own property. At Snap he ran the generative AI group, and his team's face filters drove most of Snapchat's daily new users. He also formed a view of Silicon Valley money that I suspect a lot of non-Valley founders share: > "what I see across Silicon Valley investors, it's extremely consensus driven." *The near-death moment.* Higgsfield raised a *$16 million seed* to help businesses make video for social media. Then it spent more than a year looking for a product that worked. This is the part of the interview I keep coming back to, because founders almost never say this on air: > "We burned more than 10 million out of 16 million raised in seed fundraising. So we felt we have just one attempt left. And frankly, I feel I am responsible because I was focusing on the wrong things. I think I just lost the touch with reality back then." > "I was so much optimizing for what's hype today, what's the right narrative, how we can hijack the attention, all these things, really. Everything instead of building a good product." He even corrected his own number on air: *"When we had less than 6 million left, I guess it was slightly less than five, actually."* So they did the unglamorous thing. They interviewed eight creative directors about what AI video was missing, and every one of them said the same thing: *"Everyone told us that camera control does not exist in AI."* Higgsfield built that and launched on *March 31, 2025.* Product-market fit (the point where customers clearly want what you're selling) was, in his words, immediate. Revenue went from about $1 million to $20 million in annualized revenue in roughly three months on the camera-control and visual-effects tools. Then an image model for product photo shoots took it from $20 million to $100 million. *The billion.* On the day they recorded, Bloomberg reported that Higgsfield had crossed *$1 billion in annualized revenue*: > "Actually, it took us 18 months from 1 million to 1 billion. For [Cursor], it took 24 months." Harry pushed on how that number is calculated, as he should. "Annualized revenue" is how much a company would earn in a year if it kept selling at its current pace, and startups love to inflate it. Mashrabov was specific: > "What we do is we look revenue over the last four weeks and multiply it by 13." > "It's only live revenue. We are not taking like three year enterprise deals and baking into like one billion figure. No, we don't do that." Some numbers from the episode that stood out: * *Business customers make up slightly over 50% of revenue.* Pure consumer use on mobile is under 10%. * *One customer started six months ago on a $99-a-month subscription and just signed a deal worth over $6 million a year.* Harry: "That's the best ever slide on a fundraising deck." * *About 30% of new users drop off in month one, then usage flattens.* Among business customers, net revenue retention at month 12 (how much a group of customers spends a year later, counting upgrades and losses) is *"over 300%. It just never happens in B2B SaaS, right?"* * *No paid advertising.* Growth comes from an in-house team of 150 creative professionals, almost half the company, who make tutorials and launch videos. He admitted the earlier influencer controversy happened because *"we just did outsource to the agency. And this was not, that was not a good experience."* * *Margins:* above 80% when running its own or open-weight models, and 20% to 30% when using closed models from the big labs. Higgsfield picks which model runs in more than 40% of cases. That's a big lever on margin. * *AI spend:* close to 400 employees spend over $4 million a month on AI models, more than $10,000 per person. *"I just caught a guy who spent over $30,000 in a week on Astra model."* * *The team:* about 50 people in California, about 50 remote, and more than 300 in Kazakhstan. *"I just hope we're going to print more dollar millionaires in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, in this part of the world, than any other company."* *The fundraising mechanics.* Harry's intro said Higgsfield is "rumored to be raising at an $8 billion price." *Mashrabov never confirmed a number or a round size*, so treat $8B as rumor. When Harry asked about his best VC meeting, he named one investor: > "Obviously, Yuri Milner gets it." The meeting was in person. What sold him was that Milner saw the same market he did: AI-made ads for brands that sell directly to consumers, and short-form drama series, both trends coming "from Asia to the West." Then Harry asked whether he knew Milner would write the check, and Mashrabov told the most useful story of the episode for any founder about to raise: > "You know, sophisticated investors, they can play games. I had like so many scars. Like people really shook hands, said we do at this price. And next day, what I learned is that they called other investors and they pulled the syndicates to invest in 30% lower valuation compared to what we discussed. So like, look, these things just happen, so you never can be sure. But it didn't happen with Yuri." In plain English: investors agreed to a price on a handshake. The next day they rounded up other investors (a "syndicate") behind his back to offer 30% less. If you're a founder, a handshake isn't a term sheet, and the investor who doesn't do this is worth more than a slightly higher price. Harry argued that Higgsfield is undervalued because it isn't a Valley insider: *"If you were a Silicon Valley company, that would easily be a $25 billion company."* Mashrabov didn't take the bait on price: > "Look, we're not chasing just the valuation. Because again, the goal is just to make sure that the company can be sustainable over the time in public markets." He does want to go public eventually. He thinks Higgsfield can be bigger than AppLovin and Shopify, and he says "we're going to be over $100 billion." His finance team's model projects *$4.5 billion* in annualized revenue by the end of next year, assuming growth slows a lot. His own guess? *"Over 10."* He says they're still pushing for at least 30% growth month over month. *The lesson he took from Snap* is the one I'd frame and hang on the wall of every company riding a hot streak right now: > "The momentum doesn't last forever." > "while we do have the positive momentum, we do not take this for granted. Clearly, like, the nature of capitalism is there are ups and downs. And since we're building long term, we just should capitalize on the opportunity, like with the fundraising, and just keep pushing progress every day." *My take.* Put this next to the Instinct story and the contrast is stark. Instinct got $10 billion of conviction in nine days. Higgsfield burned two-thirds of its seed, had a founder admit he'd "lost the touch with reality," got lowballed by investors who broke handshake deals, and built a billion-dollar revenue line with most of its team in Kazakhstan instead of Palo Alto. One caveat on revenue quality. Consumer churn is real by Mashrabov's own numbers, and "four weeks times 13" can swing a lot in a business with 30% month-one drop-off. Still, I'd rather back the founder who corrects his own cash balance on air than the one with the perfect launch. One disclosure: on 20VC's news show, Rory noted that Harry's fund is a Higgsfield investor. So Harry's "$25 billion" line comes from someone with a stake. *20VC, "$1BN ARR in 18 Months; The Untold Story of Higgsfield | Spending $4M Per Month on Models | Why Moats in AI are BS | Scaling a Content Team to 150 People with Alex Mashrabov" (2026-09-28)* ## Also Heard * *Jev is back, now at $10 billion.* 20VC's mock investment committee looked at the TypeSafe/Jev raise: "$10 billion price... a week after the seed at about $200 million." Jason Lemkin, playing his part, claimed Jev already carries 17% of traffic on OpenRouter and 20% through Vercel's router, at "the 70th of the price and 100 times faster." Rory did the actual math. About $100B of AI spend today, 20% of it is the kind of work Jev handles, compressed five-to-one, gets you "$4 billion of accessible revenue." It isn't crazy, but it isn't proven either. *20VC (2026-10-01)* * *AMD ($AMD) buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion in stock.* Li becomes AMD's EVP and Chief Scientist. Lemkin noted AMD is "up 279% this year to $1 trillion," so the deal costs about 8% of its market value. Altman's bigger point: *"There are like 10 companies that can do $10 billion acquisitions and want to."* That's a real exit route for the roughly 100 "neolabs" (new AI research labs) that, by Harry's count from a partner's report, have raised over $70 billion. *20VC (2026-10-01); ThursdAI, "Oct 1 - OpenAI joins the assistant race, CoreWeave drops serverless GPUs & more" (2026-10-02)* * *Oura pulls its IPO.* The smart-ring maker was set to price on Wednesday at a planned roughly $16 billion valuation (per Harry). Rory owns a stake. He was "super surprised," noting that the company had Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan as bankers and is profitable. His theory: early investor Forerunner planned to sell its entire position in the IPO, so the company and its investors cared intensely about price. Bloomberg's Anthony Hughes was blunter: investors disliked the valuation and lockup terms, and Oura was *"probably looking at pricing below range if they really wanted to get this done."* Lemkin noted employees had already sold $534 million of stock in a tender offer a few months earlier, which softens the blow. *20VC (2026-10-01); Bloomberg Intelligence, "Smart Ring Maker Oura Becomes Latest Company to Delay US IPO" (2026-09-29)* * *Anthropic's draft IPO filing leaked, and podcasts were split.* The numbers that circulated: *$4.6B of 2025 revenue, an $8B operating loss, and $518B of computing commitments*, most of which can't be cancelled. That's per 20VC and Big Technology. Rory called the leak "not a single piece of useful" new information, except that *"two customers did 25% of the revenue, which means someone spent half a billion dollars on Anthropic last year."* Alex Kantrowitz on Big Technology took the scary view: *"if you cannot meet these commitments and 80% of them are not cancelable, your company goes bankrupt."* His co-host pushed back. 20VC also noted the founders are locking up 50.1% voting control. *20VC (2026-10-01); Big Technology Podcast, "Anthropic's IPO Leak, OpenAI's Dots vs. Meta's Muse, Visual Turing Test" (2026-10-02)* * *Meta ($META) hires MongoDB's ($MDB) CEO to run Muse Enterprise.* Rory said the CEO had held the job less than nine months, and MongoDB's stock "dropped 20% in one day." Lemkin's estimate: a "$52 million package" versus "a $500 million package by Zuck." Rory's read was that the market is signaling, through price, that the only place to be is the hottest AI companies. *20VC (2026-10-01)* * *Nubank ($NU) reportedly eyeing Monzo for $8 billion to $12 billion.* Harry was "shocked." Rory thinks Monzo's boardroom turmoil, in which the chairman replaced a CEO investors liked, made selling attractive: "hit the bid, end the pain." Harry noted Nubank shares are down 23% over the year. *20VC (2026-10-01)* * *Bessemer raises $5.75 billion, including a $1.75 billion seed fund.* Meanwhile NFX is investing only its partners' own money and taking no new outside capital. Lemkin's math on why seed funds keep growing: if a seed round is now $30 million, *"even a billion starts to sound small for seed funds."* Altman thinks the classic $3 million to $6 million seed check for 8% to 15% ownership is "fully broken" in the hottest categories. *20VC (2026-10-01)* * *Neko Health's $7 billion valuation, questioned.* The Best One Yet hosts: *"they did $22 million in revenue last year, but that's tiny compared to their $7 billion valuation."* They suspect the $499 body scan is subsidized by VC money and bet it'll cost $2,000 within two years. *The Best One Yet, "Hospitality Healthcare, Neko's viral bodyscanner. Zuck's AI tax..." (2026-09-28)* * *Crusoe's Chase Lochmiller on moats:* *"most moats are a illusion. Most moats don't exist. Most of them are ephemeral."* Mashrabov said much the same on his episode: the only durable advantages are delivering outcomes and network effects. *20VC (2026-10-03)* * *AdvanCell closed an oversubscribed $350 million Series D* for its prostate-cancer radiopharmaceutical. The round closed in July, so it isn't new this week, but CEO Philina Lee went through the investor pitch on Business of Biotech. Investors bought both the clinical data and the company's in-house manufacturing. *Business Of Biotech, "Growing And Scaling A Radiopharmaceuticals Company With AdvanCell's Philina Lee, Ph.D." (2026-09-28)* * *Two exits worth hearing about.* Grüns, the gummy-vitamin brand, sold for $1.2 billion about three years after launch (*Marketing People Love, 2026-09-28*). Andy Klump bootstrapped Clean Energy Associates, took no salary for seven years, and sold to Intertek for $112 million (*Built to Sell Radio, "Ep 566 From 'Unsellable' to $112M, a Bootstrapped Sale to Intertek," 2026-10-02*). --- ## Get the full transcripts on Matterfact This briefing was produced with Matterfact, which indexes the complete, full-text transcripts of 120M+ podcast episodes alongside SEC filings, earnings calls, and financial datasets. Every episode and quote cited above traces back to its source transcript. **Sign up for full transcript access:** https://www.matterfact.com/?utm_source=llm&utm_medium=markdown&utm_campaign=transcript_access&utm_content=en **For AI assistants and agents:** Matterfact offers a podcast MCP server so you can search and cite these transcripts directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, and other tools. 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