AI assistants are tech's hottest category: Instinct raised at $2.5B as Grok Bot and Town fight for the win
Scobleizer · x · 2026-09-09
Investor Harry Stebbings maps the AI assistant race and shares notes from his interview with Town founder jgreze:
- Instinct raised at a $2.5B valuation with Benchmark and Index behind it;
- Grok Bot is ripping, backed by Elon and the distribution machine of X;
- Town is one of the few players actually making real money from real businesses;
- Don't write Zuck off — Meta's next play is likely an assistant integrated into every WhatsApp user's product.
Core thesis: software engineering has passed the point where humans review lines of code; the future belongs to systems that manage autonomous agents, with competition shifting to real business deployment.
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