Here Not There Labs, a Web3 startup, has completed $25.5 million in financing, led by a16z, and participated by Benchmark and Framework Ventures. The funds will be used to build Towns, a Web3 social protocol. Towns is a group chat protocol and application that enables communities to create programmable, autonomous "town squares," where communities can control settings such as moderation, privacy, and roles, and create tailored experiences, including rewarding members for participating or allowing Members sell NFTs in chat. Here Not There Labs was founded by Ben Rubin, co-founder of group video chat app Houseparty, live-streaming app Meerkat, and Brian Meek, former CTO of virtual reality training company STRIVR Labs and former general manager of engineering at Skype. Here Not There Labs plans to decentralize the Towns network and transfer governance and control to the Towns DAO, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization.