Town Raises $108 Million at $1 Billion Valuation to Sell AI to Main Street

Town closed a $108 million Series B on October 19 at a $1 billion valuation, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures. The round prices a bet that ordinary small-business owners, not tech insiders, are the next AI market.

CEO Jean-Denis Greze cofounded the San Francisco startup with Tony Vincent in late 2024. Before Town, Greze served as CTO of Plaid, where he grew the engineering team from roughly 20 people to 350. Town staff call him the mayor, a nickname the company embraces.

The thesis is simple. ChatGPT and Claude can already connect to other apps and, in principle, do most of what Town does. Greze admits it. "Could Claude or ChatGPT do most of what Town does? I think the answer is, most of it, yeah, they can," he told Fast Company. The problem is that almost nobody uses them that way.

Why don't ordinary people use AI agents?

Greze draws a hard line between research and action. Agentic work means the AI does things for you instead of just looking things up. Most users treat ChatGPT as a Google Search replacement.

"I think the biggest reason is that most people don't really know what to put in the chat box," Greze said. "Putting someone in front of an empty box and asking them to write what to do, especially when the capabilities are changing all the time—that's not onboarding."

He frames the gap as the whole opportunity. "No one's figured out how you take a mainstream person and get them to use these products to their full potential. That's the market opportunity. And we may be wrong, by the way. Maybe distribution just wins, and Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI end up winning. As a startup, that's the risk you're taking on."

What does the product actually do?

Greze points to one small travel firm at a vacation destination that rents cars and gear such as bikes by the day. The entire business runs over email. When something gets damaged, an employee photographs it and emails a central processor.

Town built a workflow that pulls the day's emails and pictures, checks the CRM to identify the customers, and drafts the responses. The firm used to spend 25 minutes drafting 10 to 12 of these emails daily. Now it takes 5 minutes. Greze notes that no one builds SaaS for a business that small.

Assistant, chief of staff, or something else?

Town avoids both labels. It calls its product a Townie. Greze argues that "assistant" and "chief of staff" import human expectations the technology will defy, and that nobody outside Fortune 500 CEOs knows what a chief of staff does anyway.

His preferred analogy is the browser or the device. When the App Store launched, a share of browser tasks moved to the phone. AI assistance, he says, follows the same pattern: the share of time you spend interacting with information through a browser or phone will fall forever, and the share handled by talking to an AI will rise. "The future, I think, is voice for sure," he said.

What comes next for Town?

Two things excite Greze. The first is live voice: a commute companion that briefs you on seven overnight emails, flags the two urgent ones, offers to draft a reply, and proposes options for moving a meeting—all interruptible in real time.

The second is agent-to-agent communication. Ask which colleague has a strong connection to an R&D contact at another company, and your agent queries other agents inside your firm, learns that Bob plays tennis with that person, and offers an introduction—without revealing the tennis. Greze calls privacy-preserving use of a company's internal network "huge."

Can you trust an AI with your financial accounts?

Greze expects consumers to connect everything: medical records, financial accounts, all of it. The payoff is too large. An agent that flags an overpriced credit card and tells you to switch is, in his words, "free money."

But he concedes the privacy concern is real. "I don't think you want to use an assistant where you're not convinced it's making decisions that are in your best interest. These products only work in a world where you think they truly have your best interest."

His trust test is pricing. "If you're paying for it, you can. If you're not paying for a service, you're not the customer. You're being monetized in some other way." Town charges businesses and runs its main consumer plan at $50 a month, with business revenue subsidizing consumer use cases.

How fast is the race?

Greze, who is 47, says he has never worked this hard. The reason is speed. Software once offered durable moats because copying it carried high fixed costs and early movers shipped the next feature before rivals caught up.

"With AI, competition moves so fast and good ideas are copied so quickly," he said. Work that once took nine months to replicate now takes one or two. The emotional cycle is brutal: ecstasy when Town ships ahead of OpenAI, fear that a single Sam Altman tweet will knock the company back. "So that's super stressful," he said.

Even his personal life runs through the product. Every Monday night, his Townie scans San Francisco food blogs and newspapers, then proposes four classic restaurants and four new ones for his Sunday date nights with his wife. The next test for Town's billion-dollar valuation is whether millions of non-technical customers let a Townie do the same.