{"slug": "towns-ai-assistants-learn-your-life-andreessen-horowitz-and-forerunner-just-the", "title": "Town’s AI assistants learn your life—Andreessen Horowitz and Forerunner just backed the vision with $55 million", "summary": "Town, a startup founded by former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Grézé and former Google AI director Tony Vincent, raised $55 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz to develop personalized AI assistants called Townies. The assistants connect to users' email and calendars to learn their preferences and proactively suggest or automate tasks, targeting the global AI assistant market projected to reach $74 billion by 2033. The company has nearly 10,000 users with 99% retention over two months among those who built custom automations.", "body_md": "Jean-Denis Grézé’s AI assistant is a silver fox who wears a little satchel, and her name is Ivy.\n\nIvy 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.)\n\nTown 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](https://fortune.com/company/alphabet/).\n\nTown is chasing the global AI assistant market [valued at $16 billion](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/ai-assistant-market-report) 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](https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-business-productivity-software-market), 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](https://aiimi.com/insights/who-are-knowledge-workers-and-how-does-ai-technology-speed-up-their-work) knowledge workers globally.\n\nThe company’s premise is deceptively simple: most people still aren’t [using AI](https://fortune.com/2026/05/29/anthropic-raises-65-billion-at-record-965-billion-valuation-promises-mythos-ai-model-in-wide-release-in-coming-weeks-releases-claude-opus-4-8) 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.”\n\nTown’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.\n\nGrézé describes the target user as “[prosumer](https://fortune.com/2025/01/02/the-crystal-ball-what-2025-holds-for-pivotal-sectors-including-crypto-consumer-and-health/)“: 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.\n\nTown builds on Google and [Microsoft](https://fortune.com/company/microsoft/) [infrastructure](https://fortune.com/2026/05/21/microsoft-copilot-ai-openai-satya-nadella-gemini-claude/)—the same companies fielding their own [AI assistants](https://fortune.com/2026/05/29/microsoft-working-on-super-app/) ([Gemini](https://fortune.com/2026/01/14/google-gemini-ai-personal-assistant-gmail-photos-youtube-history-personal-intelligence/) and Copilot) with far deeper native data access. Grézé isn’t dismissing the risk, but points to [precedent](https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/viktor-ai-startup-raises-75-million-for-virtual-coworker-exclusive): 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.\n\nForerunner 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.”\n\nGreen’s conviction also lies in the team. Grézé spent seven years as CTO of Plaid, including the years the [Visa](https://fortune.com/company/visa/) acquisition [collapsed](https://fortune.com/2023/11/02/plaid-ipo-visa-doj-sale-ai-instacart-cfo-payments/?utm_source=search&utm_medium=suggested_search&utm_campaign=search_link_clicks) 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.”\n\nSee you tomorrow,\n\n**Lily Mae LazarusX:**\n\n[@LilyMaeLazarus](https://archive.ph/o/tzAhs/https://x.com/LilyMaeLazarus)\n\n**Email:** lily.lazarus@fortune.com\n\nSubmit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter\n\n[here](mailto:termsheet@fortune.com).\n\n*Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.* [Subscribe here](https://archive.ph/o/tzAhs/https://fortune.com/newsletters/term-sheet).\n\n### VENTURE DEALS\n\n- [ Mach Industries](https://machindustries.com/), a Huntington Beach, Calif.-based defense technology and munitions company, raised $300 million in Series C funding.\n\n**Infinite**\n\n**Capital** and\n\n**Ribbit**\n\n**Capital** led the round.\n\n- [ Spiro](https://www.spironet.com/), a Dubai-based electric motorbike and battery-swapping company, raised $215 million in funding from\n\n**Equitane**,\n\n**Impact**\n\n**Fund**\n\n**Denmark**, and others.\n\n- [ Adaptive Innovation](https://www.adaptive.co/), a New York City and Dallas-based AI-powered home health care company, raised $50 million in Series A funding.\n\n**Felicis** led the round and was joined by\n\n**Bain**\n\n**Capital**\n\n**Ventures**,\n\n**Optum**\n\n**Ventures**,\n\n**Sunflower**\n\n**Capital**,\n\n**BoxGroup**,\n\n**Dorm**\n\n**Room**\n\n**Fund**,\n\n**Constellation**, and\n\n**SV**\n\n**Angel**.\n\n- [ Endra](https://www.endra.ai/), a Stockholm, Sweden-based AI platform for MEP engineering, raised $50 million in Series A funding.\n\n**a16z** led the round and was joined by\n\n**Notion**\n\n**Capital** and\n\n**Norrsken**\n\n**VC**.\n\n- [ Findigs](https://www.findigs.com/), a New York City-based AI-native leasing decisioning platform, raised $32 million in Series C funding.\n\n**RPM**\n\n**Ventures** led the round and was joined by\n\n**Nyca**\n\n**Partners**,\n\n**Frontier**\n\n**Venture**\n\n**Capital**, and\n\n**Western**\n\n**Technology**\n\n**Investment**.\n\n- [ Novellia](https://novellia.com/), a New York City-based real-world health data and analytics company, raised $18 million in Series A funding.\n\n**Spark**\n\n**Capital** led the round and was joined by\n\n**Khosla**\n\n**Ventures**,\n\n**Bling**\n\n**Capital**, and\n\n**TMV**.\n\n- [ Ilant Health](https://www.ilanthealth.com/), a New York City-based AI-powered obesity and cardiometabolic care company, raised $15 million in Series A funding.\n\n**Cornucopian**\n\n**Capital** led the round and was joined by\n\n**naturalX**,\n\n**Peakbridge**,\n\n**Semcap**\n\n**AI**,\n\n**Evidenced**,\n\n**Operator**\n\n**Partners**, and others.\n\n- [ Flok Health](https://www.flok.health/), a Cambridge, U.K.-based AI-powered physiotherapy company, raised $12.5 million in Series A funding.\n\n**Albion**\n\n**VC** led the round and was joined by\n\n**Eka**\n\n**VC**,\n\n**Form**\n\n**Ventures**, and\n\n**Mercia**\n\n**Ventures**.\n\n- [ Plot](https://plot.so/), a New York City-based social video analytics platform, raised $10 million in seed funding.\n\n**XYZ**\n\n**Venture**\n\n**Capital** and\n\n**Mischief**\n\n**Ventures** led the round and were joined by Seven\n\n**Seven** Six and\n\n**Acme**\n\n**Capital**.\n\n- [ ZERODRIFT](https://www.zerodrift.ai/), a New York City-based AI-powered compliance and data governance platform, raised $10 million in seed funding from\n\n**a16z**\n\n**speedrun**,\n\n**Reign**\n\n**Ventures**,\n\n**PitchDrive**\n\n**Ventures**,\n\n**U&I Ventures**, and others.\n\n- [ Bayshore](https://www.bayshore.ai/), a Munich, Germany-based agentic AI platform for legal and compliance tasks, raised $8 million in seed funding.\n\n**Earlybird**\n\n**Venture**\n\n**Capital** led the round and was joined by\n\n**Lucid**\n\n**Capital**,\n\n**Booom**,\n\n**Heliad**, and angel investors.\n\n- [ NP Company](https://www.npco.ai/), a Paris, France-based AI-powered engineering simulation software company, raised €6 million ($7 million) in pre-seed funding.\n\n**Partech** led the round and was joined by the\n\n**Peugeot** family office and angel investors.\n\n- [ INXM](https://www.inxm.ai/), a Berlin, Germany-based AI process execution engine, raised €5.7 million in pre-seed funding.\n\n**Cherry**\n\n**Ventures** led the round and was joined by\n\n**Redstone** and\n\n**Angel**\n\n**Invest**.\n\n- [ HLRBO](https://www.hlrbo.com/), a Brainerd, Minn.-based online marketplace for hunting leases, raised $2.5 million in funding.\n\n**Mairs & Power Venture Capital** led the round.\n\n### PRIVATE EQUITY\n\n- **NMI**, backed by **Francisco** **Partners**, **Great** **HIll** **Partners**, and **Insight** **Partners**, acquired [ Fee Navigator](https://www.feenavigator.com/), a Philadelphia, Pa.-based AI-powered pricing intelligence platform for payments companies. Financial terms were not disclosed.\n\n- **RTC** **Aerospace**, backed by **Stellex** **Capital** **Management**, acquired [ Automatic Products](https://automatic-products.com/), a Sumner, Wash.-based precision machined components manufacturer. Financial terms were not disclosed.\n\n- **VU** **Custom**, backed by **Greybull** **Stewardship**, acquired [ YR ID](https://thisisyr.com/), a Middlesex, U.K.-based product personalization software company.. Financial terms were not disclosed.\n\n### EXITS\n\n- **Framatome** acquired the French valves operations platform of [ Trillium Flow Technologies](https://www.trilliumflow.com/), a Glasgow, U.K. and Houston, Texas-based valves and pumps company and portfolio company of\n\n**First**\n\n**Reserve**. Financial terms were not disclosed.\n\n### PEOPLE\n\n- [ 645 Ventures](https://645ventures.com/), a New York City-based venture capital firm, promoted\n\n**William**\n\n**Hess** to Principal.\n\n- [ Angeles Equity Partners](https://www.angelesequity.com/), a Los Angeles, Calif.-based private equity firm, hired\n\n**Chris**\n\n**Huetsch** as a Principal on the investment team. Formerly, he was with\n\n**Arsenal**\n\n**Capital**\n\n**Partners**.\n\n[Sign up](https://www.fortune.com/newsletters/term-sheet?&itm_source=fortune&itm_medium=nl_article_tout&itm_campaign=term_sheet)for free.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/towns-ai-assistants-learn-your-life-andreessen-horowitz-and-forerunner-just-the", "canonical_source": "https://fortune.com/2026/06/03/towns-ai-assistants-andreessen-horowitz-forerunner-55-million/", "published_at": "2026-06-03 11:49:43+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-03 12:15:14.436807+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-startups", "ai-products", "ai-agents", "artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["Town", "Andreessen Horowitz", "Forerunner Ventures", "Jean-Denis Grézé", "Tony Vincent", "Plaid", "Google", "Fortune"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/towns-ai-assistants-learn-your-life-andreessen-horowitz-and-forerunner-just-the", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/towns-ai-assistants-learn-your-life-andreessen-horowitz-and-forerunner-just-the.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/towns-ai-assistants-learn-your-life-andreessen-horowitz-and-forerunner-just-the.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/towns-ai-assistants-learn-your-life-andreessen-horowitz-and-forerunner-just-the.jsonld"}}