Coframe Raises $25 Million to Build AI-Personalized Websites

By Nathan Brooks

Coframe raised a $25 million Series A co-led by Khosla Ventures and Hanabi Capital, lifting the startup's total funding to $35 million. The company did not disclose its valuation. Founded in 2023 by AI researcher and entrepreneur Josh Payne, Coframe develops AI systems that tailor each website to the visitor rather than serving the same page to everyone.

Khosla Ventures had already backed Coframe at the seed stage. Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, the firm's founder and partner, is now making a larger bet on the premise. "The world has changed because AI has enabled extreme customization," he told Business Insider.

Khosla said browsing the web has become a slog. He singled out Amazon, where he said the shopping experience has "gotten worse and worse and worse" over the past 15 years. His complaint is that Amazon pushes what it wants to sell instead of 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 wants to turn websites into what it calls the "living internet." The idea grew out of Payne's experience trying to grow a consumer-facing business, where he saw how much manual, labor-intensive work website updates required.

Payne studied mathematics and computer science at Stanford and previously co-founded the Tom Brady-backed sports and entertainment startup Autograph. When ChatGPT came out, he saw generative AI as a possible solution to that manual burden.

"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's goal reaches beyond generating a prettier landing page. Payne said its advantage will come from learning exactly what drives a particular customer to click and buy.

"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. The company reports these conversion-rate increases:

• Dropbox: 158%.
• Replit: 410%.
• Cash App: 60%.

Replit's 410% increase is the largest of the three reported gains.

Payne is betting that AI can give marketing technology a second act. In his view, the market has calcified around Adobe, Salesforce and 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.

What does this change for website operators?

For website operators, Coframe's pitch is to replace fixed, manually improved pages with experiences adjusted for each visitor. Payne said the system learns what drives a particular customer to click and buy, making it more than a visual redesign tool. The commercial benchmark is the revenue and conversion data Coframe reports, not the software's claim to customization.

The practical test is whether tailored pages deliver those gains outside the deployments Coframe has cited. Operators still need to measure the company-reported results against their own traffic and economics before treating the improvement as portable.

Payne frames the opportunity as a new operating model for the web, not another incremental campaign tool. "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."

Coframe's next proof point is whether it can reproduce the reported gains beyond the customers it has named. That will determine whether its $25 million round marks a durable shift in how websites operate or another addition to the marketing-software stack.