Plaid’s Former CTO Plots New Tax ‘Services’ Startup
**Plaid’s Former CTO Plots New Tax ‘Services’ Startup**
By Natasha Mascarenhas
Source: The Information
Former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze and former Google artificial intelligence and machine learning director Tony Vincent have co-founded Town, which connects small businesses with tax advisory services. The San Francisco-based startup has raised an $18 million seed round, led by First Round Capital with participation from early-stage venture firms Conviction Partners, Alt Capital, and WndrCo, as well as angel investors such as Mercury CEO Immad Akhund and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo.
In an interview, Greze said that the startup is seeking to avoid the pitfalls of most services businesses, which require human personnel to scale up. Instead, he's betting that AI can make tax advisory at least 90% more efficient. Town is also using artificial intelligence internally to do customer support, such as auto-drafting responses to clients before a human sends an email, and to look through customers' tax returns to find ways to save money. Town uses a number of foundational models, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as some of the top open-source large language models, such as Llama.
Right now, the months-old startup has 10 employees and will look to grow to 13 this year—and plans to stay that way until it hits "the right level of automation." Greze is an example of how founders are again trying to transform a high-touch services business like accounting or taxes. This time they're using generative AI, which they say will help them write their own code faster and automate human tasks, keeping costs low.
"It's an example of a new breed of companies that attack services but have AI-doing-work as the foundation," said Conviction founder Sarah Guo, whose investment partner Mike Vernal led the investment into Town. Conviction has also backed Harvey, an AI startup that aims to take the grunt work out of law firms.