Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is betting the days of one-size-fits-all websites are numbered. His latest AI investment, Coframe, wants to remake the web so every visitor sees a page tailored to them.
“The world has changed because AI has enabled extreme customization,” Khosla told Business Insider.
The startup, which aims to turn websites into what it calls the “living internet,” recently raised a $25 million Series A co-led by Khosla Ventures and Hanabi Capital, bringing its total funding to $35 million. The valuation was not disclosed.
Khosla Ventures also backed Coframe at the seed stage. He is betting that AI can finally make the long-promised idea of a website tailored to every visitor a reality.
In Khosla’s view, browsing the web has become a slog. He pointed to Amazon, where he said the shopping experience has “gotten worse and worse and worse” over the past 15 years because the company is pushing what it wants to sell rather than showing each user what is most relevant.
“The alternative is to write code for every page that’s presented, but that’s too expensive and way too slow,” Khosla said. “This idea of a customized page for every user is a really good idea.”
Coframe was founded in 2023 by Josh Payne, an AI researcher and entrepreneur who studied mathematics and computer science at Stanford and previously co-founded the Tom Brady-backed sports and entertainment startup Autograph. Payne said Coframe grew out of the manual, labor-intensive work he saw while trying to grow a consumer-facing business. When ChatGPT came out, he saw generative AI could be the solution.
“Websites are static,” Payne told Business Insider. “You build them once; they’re one size fits all, and then it takes a tremendous amount of effort to improve them over time.”
Coframe
Payne said Coframe’s goal is not just to use AI to generate a prettier landing page. Its advantage, he said, will come from learning exactly what drives a particular customer to click and buy something.
“It’s very bespoke,” he said. “For the consumer, we’re giving a more relevant experience, something that is better representing what the business does and the goods and services that they provide.”
Coframe says it has generated more than $300 million in incremental revenue for customers including Dropbox, BCG, Block, Backcountry, and Sur La Table. It says conversion rates have risen 158% at Dropbox, 410% at Replit, and 60% at Cash App.
Marketing tech has rarely made venture capitalists swoon. In Payne’s view, the market has calcified into a handful of entrenched giants, including Adobe and Salesforce, plus a long list of vendors selling incremental tools for testing, targeting, and measuring campaigns. Optimizely, once a Silicon Valley darling, was acquired for an undisclosed sum in 2021.
Payne is betting AI gives the category a second act.
“The internet is going to have its own sense of life,” he said. “The technology is very rapidly catching up to be able to deliver that, so we want to be the ones that help to deliver that.”
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