{"slug": "investor-update-july-2026", "title": "Investor Update – July 2026", "summary": "Val Town, the instant deploy platform for small apps, reported 6% ARR growth in July 2026, missing its 20% target, though Pro subscriptions grew 26% month-over-month. The company added DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731 as the default model in Townie, citing it as 13x cheaper than GLM 5.2, 89x cheaper than Opus 5, and 178x cheaper than Fable 5. Val Town also began its SOC 2 Type II audit and plans to release Val Town Access for secure team access to private vals.", "body_md": "Dear investors and friends,\n\nVal Town is the instant deploy platform for small apps. Our mission is spreading the joy of programming.\n\n## July 2026\n\nIn July, ARR grew 6%. Not quite our 20% target, but still decently positive. The growth came from Pro subscriptions ($25 / month), which as its own ARR category grew 26% in July (up from 16% in June). The majority of those customers were referred to us by AI.\n\nOur use-case focus has been internal tools, particularly around growth and go-to-market, and we've been doing a lot of dogfooding. We built ourselves a CRM, Slackbot, and a handful of other bots to help us figure out which users to talk to.\n\nIn product updates:\n\n- We added\n`DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731`\n\nto Townie, and made it the default model. In my opinion, it's smart enough for most of what you'll need in Val Town, and 13x cheaper than`GLM 5.2`\n\n, 89x cheaper than`Opus 5`\n\n, and 178x cheaper than`Fable 5`\n\n– not to mention that it's fast and shows its reasoning traces. [ChatGPT Plugin](https://chatgpt.com/plugins/plugin_asdk_app_6a5e7ac6ddf881919de226cb7506ef57?q=val+town)[The Val Town Docs](https://docs.val.town/)are[now hosted on Val Town](https://blog.val.town/docfooding)[Started our SOC 2 Type II audit](https://trust.val.town/)[& lots more](https://blog.val.town/changelog-2026-08-06)\n\n## August 2026\n\nOur goal for August remains growing MRR 20%.\n\nOur use-case focus remains growth & GTM engineering. We will help others build internal tools, continue to build our own growth internal tools on Val Town, and increasingly talk publicly about what we're building.\n\nIn terms of product, we're about to release Val Town Access to enable your team to securely access your private vals.\n\nWe're also thinking a lot about Slack as a core surface area for our product. Let's make programming more multiplayer! Internal tools typically are illegible, brittle, built by one person, and difficult for others to understand, maintain or tweak. We think building in your internal tools in Slack with a Val Town agent could solve many of these problems – while at the same time, making your work on your internal tools more immediately legible to the rest of your company. Our instant deploys are an amazing fit for this paradigm.\n\nGiven where the market is, we're also thinking a lot about our AEO (getting AIs to recommend us more) and better evals for agents (ensuring LLMs have good experiences with us).\n\n**Key numbers**\n\n**Team**: 6\n\n**Hiring**: [1 Infra Engineer](https://val-town.notion.site/infra-eng)\n\n**Revenue Growth**: 6% (Goal: 20%)\n\n## Highlights\n\n- ARR grew 6%\n- Pro ARR grew 26%\n- Townie is another 13x cheaper\n\n## Lowlights\n\n- Missed the 20% ARR growth goal\n[79 bug bounty reports in July (6 valid)](https://x.com/stevekrouse/status/2083598708537454753)\n\nBest,\n\nSteve\n\n**We're hiring!**\n\nAre you an infra engineer who cares about the joy of programming?", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/investor-update-july-2026", "canonical_source": "https://blog.val.town/2026-july", "published_at": "2026-08-11 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-13 15:35:48.638525+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products", "developer-tools", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Val Town", "DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731", "GLM 5.2", "Opus 5", "Fable 5", "Steve Krouse", "Townie", "Val Town Access"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/investor-update-july-2026", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/investor-update-july-2026.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/investor-update-july-2026.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/investor-update-july-2026.jsonld"}}