AI assistant startup Town announced a $108 million Series B round co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, pushing its valuation past $1 billion. The San Francisco company, founded by former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze, has now raised at least $160 million total after a $55 million Series A in June, and says it reached millions in annual recurring revenue within weeks of its public launch. Andreessen Horowitz, Serena Ventures, and First Round Capital also joined the round, alongside a new shared workflow feature that updates all employees' AI assistants, called Townies, with company-wide information automatically.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-19
A growing number of employers are abandoning the once-a-year engagement survey model, which typically produces a flurry of scorecards, town halls and action-planning committees before fading from attention. In its place, organizations are adopting more frequent, lighter-touch feedback methods meant to capture employee sentiment on an ongoing basis rather than in a single annual snapshot.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-01
Officials in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania have proposed giving every household $10,000 if a planned data center project moves forward. Despite the cash incentive, many residents in the rural town are opposing the facility's construction.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-27
An Entrepreneur opinion piece uses a fictional Norwegian town plagued by repeated house fires to illustrate 'systemization thinking': instead of repeatedly dispatching firefighters, residents traced the fires to flammable soundproofing material installed under kitchen walls by the original builder. Once that material was removed and smoke alarms installed, the fires stopped for good, illustrating how fixing an underlying flaw beats repeatedly treating the same recurring problem.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-16
The Trump administration has appealed a federal court ruling that blocked its policy allowing detention and deportation of noncitizen researchers who study harmful online content, arguing they pose national security risks. Separately, a judge dismissed a related lawsuit from Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, ruling that courts lack jurisdiction to stop deportation proceedings even though she criticized Secretary of State Marco Rubio's justification for targeting him.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-14
Val Town, a vibe coding platform, describes how it adopted Dynamic Client Registration (DCR), a little-known OAuth extension built into the MCP spec by Anthropic and OpenAI, to let apps automatically register as OAuth clients without manual developer portal work. Using this, Val Town built its MCP server so Claude and ChatGPT can authenticate into user accounts, and created a library called std/oauth that lets any app add 'Login with Val Town' in just two lines of code.
blog.val.town
· 2026-09-04
Val Town's team found that most new Pro subscribers in July were referred by AI systems, chiefly Claude, even before the company deliberately optimized its site for machine readers. They discovered that many of these referrals came not from clickable citations but from the models' training memory mentioning Val Town as plain text, meaning standard referral tracking like utm_source and Referer headers missed much of the actual traffic source.
blog.val.town
· 2026-09-01
DoltLite, a fork of SQLite that swaps its B-tree storage layer for a Git-style Prolly Tree engine, has reached Beta status at version 0.50.0 just five months after launch. The project reuses SQLite's SQL parser, analyzer and file system code untouched, while the underlying storage was rebuilt to support branching, merging, diffing and syncing like Dolt and Git. The maintainers say the work was largely completed through around 2,000 pull requests generated by AI coding agents using an orchestrator called Gas Town.
dolthub.com
· 2026-09-01
GoKawiil