Talk of the Town: Menlo Is Co-Leading Town’s $108M Series B

Over the last five months, the Menlo team has roughly doubled in size.

Our new hires work for less than $100/month, don’t need desks, and work 24/7. Since we put the whole firm on Town in June, our Townies have quietly become the hardest-working members of the team: triaging inboxes at 6 a.m., prepping briefings before anyone has logged on, and chasing every last follow-up over the weekend.

It took us a long time to find an email-first, work-focused assistant we would trust. Over the past two years, we have met nearly every team building in the space, looking for one that could do useful work without first being taught how each of us works. Town did that from the get-go. Before any of us had typed a prompt, it had read our calendars and inboxes, started proposing work, and written drafts that already sounded like us. It was clear, from the first moment, that this was a company we just had to be a part of. 

Today, Menlo is co-leading Town’s $108M Series B at a $1B valuation, alongside Forerunner, with participation from a16z and First Round.

Five Months With Town

A few weeks after we put the firm on Town, our Slack was full of people posting screenshots of their “moments of magic.” Townies that had caught commitments people had forgotten, pulled the right context into replies before anyone went looking for it, and held together days that were about to fall apart. More than once, one surfaced a contact or a founder that someone had spent weeks trying to find.

And while we’re very happy Town users of our own, we are also encouraged by Town’s reach across industries and company sizes. Town’s users range from founders and operators to small business owners who run their companies from email, real estate agents managing dozens of clients at once, executive assistants, consultants, and parents coordinating a household.

Focusing on Work

Work is where an assistant can help the most, because it’s where most of our waking hours go—a surprising amount of which gets spent on tasks supporting the job rather than the job itself. Knowledge workers spend more than 13 hours a week on email, chat, and text alone, and much of that time goes to the same tasks every week, such as sending follow-up messages or scheduling meetings. Companies will gladly pay to take that work off their teams’ plates, but only with software they trust inside their inboxes, and Town was built to earn that trust from the start: built by Plaid’s CTO, SOC 2-certified, never trains on customer data, and, by default, writes drafts rather than sends.

Town is already growing from one person’s assistant into a company’s. A Townie can get what it needs from a teammate’s Townie without either person stepping in, and a group of Townies can compare calendars and agree on a meeting time on their own. Some of the best moments in our own Slack came from one Townie quietly asking another for help. And it’s not just limited to messaging and calendar coordination; Town has over 60 integrations, with tools spanning CRM (e.g., Salesforce, Affinity), project management (e.g., Jira, Asana), coding (e.g., GitHub, Cursor), finance (e.g., QuickBooks, Stripe), and more. With each new integration, Townies see more of what the team is working on and can take more of it on.

Over time, we believe Town becomes the place where a knowledge worker’s day begins, with a Townie that already knows what matters across every tool and has started on it before they arrive. We are thrilled by the idea of an always up-to-date dashboard of priorities rather than long lists of messages to triage.

Partnering With JD and Tony

Jean-Denis Greze and Tony Vincent have worked together since Dropbox, where JD ran engineering and Tony led product design. JD went on to become CTO of Plaid as the company grew from roughly $10M to over $300M in ARR, and Tony founded and sold two companies before running product for Applied AI at Google. While their experience shines through in the strength of Town’s infrastructure, their sharp product judgment truly sets them apart. They gave every assistant a name and a face, so people build a relationship with their Townie instead of treating it as one more tool. They made the agent draft rather than send, because nobody hands over their inbox to something that might embarrass them. And they built for the person who will never write a prompt, so Town does its first useful work before anyone asks.

Menlo has been close to this problem for a long time—Shawn built Handle, an email and task assistant, in the early 2010s before AI made a time-saving solution tractable. The time is now, and Town has the best product and the best team we have seen in the category.

To JD, Tony, and the whole team at Town: We are thrilled to be partners in this.

—Menlo Ventures and our Townies