Town.com Inc., an artificial intelligence agent startup laser focused on getting work done by collaborating with other AI agents, revealed today that it has raised $108 million in a new funding at a $1 billion valuation.
The Series B round was led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, and saw participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Serena Ventures and First Round Capital, bringing Town’s total amount raised to date to $160 million, following a $55 million Series A that closed in June.
The startup, co-founded by former Plaid Inc. Chief Technology Officer Jean-Denis Greze, has already achieved a revenue run rate in the millions of dollars just weeks after it launched its first assistants, known as “townies,” in June, according to a blog post by Menlo partners Shawn Carolan, Amy Wu Martin and Sam Borja.
Menlo’s partners explained that Greze was previously in charge of engineering at the financial services firm Plaid, while his co-founder Tony Vincent has been involved in two prior startups: Aspen Designs Inc., which was later acquired by Google LLC, and Sold Inc., which was bought by Dropbox Inc. in 2013. It was after joining Dropbox that Vincent met Greze for the first time, beginning a friendship that ultimately led to the founding of Town.
Town targets businesses, providing each employee with a Townie that helps with tasks by connecting to tools such as emails and calendars, as well as other core work systems. Employees’ Townies can talk to each other and share approved information; they can also now work with customers and others outside the company.
In their blog post, Carolan, Martin and Borja wrote that Menlo’s entire team began using Town in June and, within a very short time, their Townies became their hardest working team members. “A few weeks after we put the firm on Town, our Slack was full of people posting screenshots of their ‘moments of magic,’” the partners wrote. “Townies that had caught commitments people had forgotten, pulled the right context into replies before anyone went looking for it, and held together days that were about to fall apart. More than once, one surfaced a contact or a founder that someone had spent weeks trying to find.”
Where Townies really stand out is through the extent of the business context they understand. In a blog post announcing today’s round, Greze and Vincent explained that Townies don’t just know their users, but also familiarize themselves with each of their colleagues.
As a result, they know how their CEO writes, who has the strongest relationships with each buyer, what each sales lead cares about most, and all of the processes that go into running the business. Because each of these people also has a Townie, they can work together, leveraging their deep understanding of how the company runs.
A crucial benefit for businesses is that Town ensures they own this context, which was previously trapped in the heads of their employees and buried inside their email inboxes. That context had a habit of disappearing whenever someone was too busy, or left the company. Townies ensure that no longer happens, transforming that context into a compounding asset that enables everyone to work faster and smarter.
“We believe that this context is a critical asset and should belong to the company that built it,” Greze and Vincent wrote. “That’s why if you ever leave Town, you can take it with you and use it anywhere.”
Going forward, the co-founders said they’ll use the money from today’s round to build more integrations to expand the usefulness of their Townies as they strive to become a permanent fixture in employees’ daily lives. While their capabilities are impressive, Townies still need to demonstrate longevity to justify the startup’s new unicorn valuation.