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.”
