By Hamza Faisal

Silicon Valley's newest obsession just minted its latest unicorn. Town, the San Francisco startup building AI assistants it calls "Townies," announced on Monday that it has raised a $108 million Series B round valuing the company at $1 billion.

The round was co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and First Round Capital participating alongside Better Tomorrow Ventures, Precedent.vc, Scribble Ventures, Serena Ventures and Sparked Ventures. Prominent angels — including Brendan Foody, Josh Silverman, Romain Huet, Scott Belsky, Steve Bartel, Taro Fukuyama and Varun Anand — also joined.

Assistants that actually work together

Town's bet is simple but ambitious: personal AI assistants have made individuals faster, but most real work depends on other people — a model from finance, access from an ops lead, input from the field sales team. When every assistant works alone, the team still waits on everyone else.

The fix: give each person a Townie that plugs into their email, docs, calendar and core systems — then let those Townies talk to each other. They ask each other questions, connect the dots and hand off work, while still answering to their own person. A Townie only shares what its person would share, asks permission when needed and brings the genuinely human decisions back to the human. Townies can even work directly with customers, partners and candidates outside the company over email and text.

The company offers a concrete example: when the BizOps team updates competitor battle cards, it changes the team's call-prep process once, and every salesperson's Townie immediately starts preparing calls with the new competitive analysis baked in.

Blistering early traction

Town launched publicly in June 2026 with a $55 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and the growth since has been striking: seven-figure annual recurring revenue within weeks of launch, paying customers up fourfold and paying teams up ninefold since July.

Co-founded in 2024 by former Plaid chief technology officer Jean-Denis Greze and former Google applied-AI product director Tony Vincent, Town has picked a crowded lane and a distinctive position in it. The round closed amid what industry newsletter Newcomer calls a "personal agent frenzy": rival consumer assistant Instinct, run by Spear Street Technology, has raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.

The fundraise itself had drama. Earlier reporting said Index Ventures was leading the round — but after potential rival Instinct objected to Index backing both companies, Forerunner and Menlo stepped in to replace it, an unusual about-face for a round this buzzy.

Model-agnostic, enterprise-ready

For the enterprise pitch, Town is leaning on trust and flexibility. The product draws on models from all the major AI labs, using whichever fits each task best, so customers are not locked into a single stack. By default, nothing a customer connects is used to train models, and Town says it is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant with a public data processing agreement.

Menlo partner Shawn Carolan, a co-lead on the deal, framed the stakes in historical terms: his firm backed Siri in 2008 to transform the interface to the internet; the technology has finally arrived, he said, and the business opportunity — assistants for work rather than pleasure — is "ultimately the larger."

By Hamza Faisal