Jean-Denis Grézé’s AI assistant is a silver fox who wears a little satchel, and her name is Ivy.
Ivy is Grézé’s Townie—the personalized AI assistant at the center of his startup, Town. His choice of mascot, an homage to his prematurely grey hair, says something about the product’s philosophy: this isn’t a chatbot. It’s yours. (Mine is a rotund, furry creature named Algernon.)
Town raised a $55 million Series A, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Fortune learned exclusively. Forerunner Ventures, First Round, Alt Capital, and Conviction also participated. The company was founded in late 2024 by Grézé—former CTO of Plaid—and Tony Vincent, former director of applied AI at Google.
Town is chasing the global AI assistant market valued at $16 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $74 billion by 2033. The productivity software layer it sits on top of is already a $110 billion business, on its way to $196 billion by 2031. And the actual prize—what Grézé calls “a trillion-plus in revenue”—is the more than one billion knowledge workers globally.
The company’s premise is deceptively simple: most people still aren’t using AI to its full potential. “The 80th percentile user uses ChatGPT or Claude at most three times a day,” Grézé told me. “They just don’t have good intuition for what AI can or can’t do. Those systems aren’t connected to everything they use.”
Town’s answer is to flip the relationship entirely. Users can’t sign up without connecting their email and calendar. From there, Town builds a picture of who they are and begins suggesting actions before they’ve had to ask. In the first five minutes, it surfaces a biography of the user based on what it already knows, then offers three to five things it can do at that moment. Over time, Townies learn preferences, notice patterns, and eventually ask whether they should just handle certain tasks automatically. Examples include automatically generating research briefs on unknown senders of emails or automatically translating documents into a preferred language.
Grézé describes the target user as “prosumer“: people who use the product for work (about 70-80% of usage) but whose personal and professional lives are deeply entangled. (They have a sizable user community of Australian plumbers—one user told the company he gets 300 emails a day spanning emergencies, active job sites, potential new clients, and supplier bills. Town sorts all of it.) The company is approaching 10,000 users, with 99% retention over two months among users who’ve built even one custom automation.
Town builds on Google and Microsoft infrastructure—the same companies fielding their own AI assistants (Gemini and Copilot) with far deeper native data access. Grézé isn’t dismissing the risk, but points to precedent: Superhuman competes directly with Gmail and hasn’t been locked out. Notion has built hundreds of millions in revenue on top of Google Docs. “Even Google, to build a competing product, has to benefit from the entire ecosystem being open,” he said.
Forerunner founder and managing partner Kirsten Green has confidence in Town’s ability to stay ahead. “There is a lot to be said for just being focused on delivering on a particular value proposition to a particular type of user,” she said. “Everyone at Town is focused on how to make users and their Townies more powerful, more productive, and more in partnership together.”
Green’s conviction also lies in the team. Grézé spent seven years as CTO of Plaid, including the years the Visa acquisition collapsed under DOJ scrutiny—watching a transformative exit evaporate and rebuilding from it. The lesson, he says, is that building something people love is the only durable thing. “We don’t want Town to extract data out of you, we don’t want it to threaten your job,” he said. “We just want to build something that generally helps people.”
See you tomorrow,
Lily Mae LazarusX:
@LilyMaeLazarus Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS
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Seven Six and
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Lucid
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Booom,
Heliad, and angel investors.
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PRIVATE EQUITY
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NMI, backed by Francisco Partners, Great HIll Partners, and Insight Partners, acquired Fee Navigator, a Philadelphia, Pa.-based AI-powered pricing intelligence platform for payments companies. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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RTC Aerospace, backed by Stellex Capital Management, acquired Automatic Products, a Sumner, Wash.-based precision machined components manufacturer. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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EXITS
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PEOPLE
- 645 Ventures, a New York City-based venture capital firm, promoted William
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