Instinct

Instinct is launching a frontier agent harness designed to give solo traders the operational footprint of an investment firm. It runs as a proactive team of agents that searches thousands of markets, investigates opportunities, and operates 24/7 , with the human sitting at the top as portfolio manager while the agents handle the research and execution layer underneath. The launch marks the first public release of the system, aimed at active traders who want to cover more surface area than any individual analyst could reasonably track. The company is based in San Francisco and backed by Y Combinator. It was founded by Joon Won Song and Eunju Moon , who previously worked as a quantitative developer at Squarepoint Capital (Song) and as a quantum computing PhD researcher at USC (Moon), with both having studied at Imperial College London before moving into the company full time. The timing reflects a specific thesis about where edge is moving in markets. Instinct's argument, carried through from the launch tweet, is that the organizational advantage hedge funds built around pooling talent and capital can now be reproduced in software for a single operator, leaving the remaining differentiation in a trader's own worldview, judgment, and conviction on individual bets. For founders, operators, and investors tracking how agent systems move from general assistants into domain-specific workflows, this is one of the first serious attempts to package a buy-side stack for one person.