There is no cooling off venture capital’s love affair with artificial intelligence.
Coatue Management has made a big investment in a hot new AI start-up whose valuation has quadrupled in just a month. The Tiger Cub teamed up with VC giants Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital to invest $1 billion in Instinct, which is building a so-called personal agent, per a company announcement.
The financing resulted in a valuation of $10 billion. This is astounding given that only one month ago, the company raised $250 million in a Series B round at a $2.5 billion valuation. That fundraise was co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Instinct, founded by 23-year-old Noah Shinn, began beta testing only in February, the Journal reports. It aims to compete with Meta Platforms’ Muse, ChatGPT Work, and SpaceXAI’s Grok Bot in developing an AI consumer offering.
“We’re building Instinct to be the best personal agent that can handle the deeply personal nuances of everyday life,” Shinn said in a press release. The company added: “Whether it’s planning a cross-country road trip, ordering the weekly groceries, or canceling subscriptions left forgotten, Instinct handles the whole task from start to finish. Just text or call, and Instinct uses its own phone and computer to get it done.”
Coatue has ramped up its VC activity this year and is on pace to make the most private investments in four years. Instinct is its 12th new VC deal this quarter, with two days remaining. Altogether, it has made 45 new investments this year through September 28, compared with 52 in 2025 and 42 in 2024, per Crunchbase’s database. Coatue made 79 new investments in 2022 and a firm record 179 during the VC frenzy of 2021.
Many of its recent investments have been in AI. It has made 127 such investments compared with 130 in software companies, its most active industry since its VC inception, according to Crunchbase’s count.
In August, Coatue led a $5 billion financing round for software company Databricks, which valued the company at $190 billion. Back in February, the company’s valuation was $134 billion.
Also this quarter, Coatue participated in the $550 million fundraise of legal AI startup Harvey at a $15.5 billion valuation. And earlier this year, it participated in the latest financing rounds of SpaceX and Anthropic.
Coatue is clearly the most active VC investor in tech-related companies among firms most noted for their hedge funds.
Tiger Global Management, once the most active of the group, has completed at least nine new investments in the third quarter, Crunchbase says. Altogether, it has made 25 new investments this year compared with 39 in all of 2025. It famously made roughly one a day — including weekends — in 2021.
Institutional Investor recently reported that Tiger Global made additional investments in at least three private robotics companies in recent weeks. The deals are all follow-on investments, as the firm was an early investor in the sector.
In the most recent example, Tiger Global was one of a handful of investment firms that participated in a $31 million funding for Vecna Robotics, which designs and makes autonomous mobile robots. It also participated in the $550 million Series E funding of Temporal Technologies at a $12.55 billion valuation, according to the company.
This is the Tiger Cub’s fourth investment in Temporal, which is described by Crunchbase as an open-source platform that simplifies building and managing long-running workflows and microservices.
