a16z leads Town's Series A
America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts
For the past few years, using AI has mostly meant staring at a blank prompt box and knowing the right thing to ask it. You open a chatbot, type in context, and ask a question. You get back an answer that is directionally helpful but not quite right…so you provide more context and feedback. Screenshots, emails, Slack messages, Google Doc links. Eventually, you get a version that works…which you then copy and send somewhere else. Every step is an action you have to take.
AI is magical, but making it work for you is not. Most people don’t want to become prompt engineers or babysit agents or maintain workflows or learn yet another tool. They want what AI was supposed to deliver in the first place: help.
Real help requires context and proactivity.
Context is complicated and personal. It sometimes lives in lists of rules, but more often can only be extracted from thousands of observed data points on how you make decisions and communicate. It means knowing how you write to your team versus a customer, which appointments and emails matter, and which follow-ups you must prioritize, or often drop.
With strong context as the foundation, a proactive system can begin to unlock true leverage. It’s not just the dream of that email being drafted and sent for you, that calendar invite self-creating, or that to-do list being maintained. Proactivity that unlocks leverage pattern matches to suggest and create custom workflows built just for you.
That’s why we’re so excited by what Town is building. Town is a personal AI assistant that works across the tools you already use—email, calendar, Slack, docs, WhatsApp, desktop, web. It learns how you work and starts proactively pitching in. Not because you configured it just right, but because it actually understands you and how you work.
The first wave of AI gave people access to intelligence. The next wave is about leverage. And leverage doesn’t come from a smarter text box—it comes from systems that hold context, proactively suggest next steps and take action, and get better the more you use them. Town has created that loop and built a product that makes your life easier.
People are already leaning on Town for the kind of work that’s personal and operationally messy: running recruiting pipelines, juggling school logistics, processing handwritten grant requests, prepping summaries, drafting follow-ups, catching the stuff that would otherwise slip.
The longer you use it, the more it picks up: your voice, your relationships, your preferences, your routines, what you actually care about. That accumulated context is the product. And it’s not something a competitor can spin up overnight.
We’ve known Jean-Denis Greze for years and have always admired how he thinks about product and infrastructure. When Town started showing up in our own circles and group chats—shared by users who genuinely loved it—we paid attention.
JDG and Tony are the right team for something this hard. JDG was CTO at Plaid and an engineering leader at Dropbox. Tony led product and AI at Google and design at Dropbox. Town needs both sides: serious technical infrastructure and unusually good product taste. It has to live across your whole life and still feel simple, trustworthy, and human.
Personal AI assistants are going to be one of the defining consumer software categories of the next decade. But the winner won’t be whoever ships the most features. It’ll be whoever earns enough trust to hold your context, and eventually, more and more of your actual work. That’s where Town is headed.
Today we’re excited to lead Town’s $55 million Series A, with Forerunner Ventures, First Round, Alt Capital, Conviction, and others joining us.
Welcome, JDG, Tony, and the Town team, to the a16z family.
This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not investment advice, nor is it intended for use by any investors or prospective investors in any a16z funds. This newsletter may link to other websites or contain other information obtained from third-party sources - a16z has not independently verified nor makes any representations about the current or enduring accuracy of such information. If this content includes third-party advertisements, a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content or related companies contained therein. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z; visit https://a16z.com/investment-list/ for a full list of investments. Other important information can be found at a16z.com/disclosures. You’re receiving this newsletter since you opted in earlier; if you would like to opt out of future newsletters you may unsubscribe immediately.