Town Secures $108 Million in Series B Funding to Democratize Agentic AI for Small Businesses

While the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence has dominated the tech discourse for the better part of two years, a significant gap remains between the potential of these models and their practical, everyday application for the average business owner. While large enterprises have moved quickly to integrate complex AI workflows, small-business owners and mid-market firms have largely remained on the sidelines, often viewing AI as little more than a sophisticated, high-speed search engine. A new San Francisco-based startup, Town, is aiming to bridge that chasm, and it has just secured a massive vote of confidence from the investment community to do so.

On October 19, Town officially announced that it had closed a $108 million Series B funding round, pushing the company to a $1 billion valuation—the coveted "unicorn" status. The round was co-led by two heavyweights in the venture capital world: Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures. The influx of capital marks a pivotal moment for the startup, which was founded in late 2024 by Jean-Denis Greze and Tony Vincent.

Greze, who serves as the company’s CEO—and who is known within the halls of the startup as the "mayor" of Town—brings a wealth of technical and operational experience to the venture. Before launching Town, Greze was the Chief Technology Officer at the financial infrastructure giant Plaid. During his tenure there, he played a critical role in scaling the company’s engineering organization, overseeing a period of rapid growth that saw the team expand from a lean group of 20 engineers to a robust department of 350. That experience in scaling complex systems and building user-centric technical tools is now being applied to the fundamental challenge of making AI agents accessible to the broader business world.

The core premise of Town is that the current generation of AI tools, while powerful, suffers from a "blank page" problem. Most users, when faced with an open-ended chat interface like those found in ChatGPT or Claude, are unsure of how to translate their business needs into specific prompts that yield actionable results. Town is betting that by shifting the focus from research-oriented AI to "agentic" AI—tools that don’t just answer questions but actually execute tasks across various software applications—it can unlock a new level of productivity for small-business owners who have previously felt excluded from the AI revolution.

In a wide-ranging conversation about the state of the industry, Greze reflected on the disparity between how tech insiders view AI and how it is actually used by the general public. He noted that while the industry is currently obsessed with the technical capabilities of large language models, the true measure of success lies in whether these tools can reliably complete work on behalf of the user.

"Could Claude or ChatGPT do most of what Town does? I think the answer is, most of it, yeah, they can," Greze acknowledged. "But most people who use ChatGPT or Claude aren’t using those tools to do what people in tech describe as agentic work, which just means using them to actually do things for you as opposed to researching things for you. They use it more as a Google Search replacement."

This distinction is central to Town’s product philosophy. If an AI is merely a search engine, it acts as a passive repository of information. An agent, by contrast, is a proactive participant in a workflow. It can connect to the various software tools a small business uses daily—accounting platforms, CRM software, communication channels—and perform tasks like drafting invoices, scheduling meetings, or managing client inquiries without requiring the user to navigate the complexities of each individual app.

Greze believes the primary barrier to adoption is not a lack of interest, but a lack of guidance. The current paradigm of prompting requires a user to know exactly what to ask and how to ask it, which creates a significant cognitive load. When a user is presented with an empty chat box and expected to instruct a powerful AI, the lack of structure becomes a deterrent rather than an invitation.

"I think the biggest reason is that most people don’t really know what to put in the chat box," Greze explained. "Putting someone in front of an empty box and asking them to write what to do, especially when the capabilities are changing all the time—that’s not onboarding."

By focusing on the specific needs of small-business owners and mid-market firms, Town intends to strip away the technical overhead that keeps many potential users away from advanced AI. For a business owner running a retail store, a consulting firm, or a local service business, the goal is not to "prompt engineer" a response; it is to get a task finished so they can focus on their customers. If an AI can reliably handle the administrative burden of running a business, the value proposition shifts from novelty to necessity.

The $1 billion valuation reflects the high expectations surrounding this shift. As investors, Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures are betting that the next wave of AI growth will not come from building larger, more expensive models, but from building more intuitive interfaces that allow non-technical users to harness existing model intelligence for practical, high-value work.

For Greze, the journey of building Town is a demanding one, requiring a level of intensity that he says exceeds anything he has encountered in his career to date. The pressure of hitting the $1 billion mark shortly after the company’s inception is significant, but it also serves as a validation of the need for the product. The mission is clear: to move AI from the realm of the hobbyist and the early adopter into the daily operational workflow of the average professional.

As Town begins to deploy its $108 million in new capital, the industry will be watching closely to see if the "mayor" of this new AI venture can successfully guide the market toward a more agentic future. For now, the startup remains focused on the fundamentals of user experience—ensuring that the power of artificial intelligence is no longer hidden behind an intimidating interface, but is instead accessible to anyone with a business to run and a task to complete. In a market saturated with chatbots, Town is aiming to build something that feels less like a conversation and more like a coworker.