Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla believes the days of one-size-fits-all websites are numbered. His latest AI venture, Coframe, hopes to reinvent the web so that every visitor sees a page tailored to them.
“The world has changed because artificial intelligence has enabled extreme customization,” Khosla told Business Insider.
The startup, which aims to turn websites into what it calls the “living Internet,” recently raised $25 million in Series A funding 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 firmly believes that artificial intelligence can finally turn the long-promised idea of tailoring websites for each visitor into a reality.
For Khosla, browsing the web has become a chore. He cited Amazon as an example, saying the shopping experience has “become worse and worse” over the past 15 years because the company is pushing the products it wants to sell rather than showing each user the most relevant products.
“Another approach would be to write code for every page displayed, but that’s too expensive and slow,” Khosla said. “The idea of customizing pages for each user is a really good one.”
Coframe was founded in 2023 by Josh Payne, an artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur who studied mathematics and computer science at Stanford University and previously co-founded Autograph, a Tom Brady-backed sports and entertainment startup. Payne said Coframe grew out of the manual labor-intensive work he saw while trying to grow a consumer-facing business. When ChatGPT came along, he saw that generative artificial intelligence might be the solution.
“The website is static,” Payne told Business Insider. “You build them once; they are generic, and then it takes a huge effort to improve them over time.”
Josh Payne is the founder and CEO of Coframe Section Framework
Payne said Coframe’s goal isn’t just to use AI to produce more beautiful landing pages. Its advantage, he said, will come from understanding exactly what drives specific customers to click and buy.
“It’s very bespoke,” he said. “For consumers, we are delivering a more relevant experience that better represents what businesses do and the goods and services they offer.”
Coframe says it has generated more than $300 million in incremental revenue for clients including Dropbox, BCG, Block, Backcountry and Sur La Table. Conversion rates are said to have increased by 158% for Dropbox, 410% for Replit, and 60% for Cash App.
Marketing technology rarely fascinates venture capitalists. In Payne’s view, the market has ossified into a handful of entrenched giants, including Adobe and Salesforce, and a long list of vendors selling incremental tools for testing, targeting and measuring campaigns. Optimizely, once a Silicon Valley darling, was acquired in 2021 for an undisclosed amount.
Payne believes artificial intelligence will give the category a second chance.
“The Internet will have its own sense of life,” he said. “Technology is catching up quickly to make this possible, so we want to be the ones helping make that happen.”
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