Sometimes, you can only spot what is wrong when you have been part of the process for a while. That was the case for Michelle Lim, who, while running Warp’s growth marketing effort earlier this year, realized that the company was not updating its website quickly enough.
She noticed that potential customers were asking ChatGPT and other AI bots all kinds of questions about Warp’s offering. However, the information they sought, such as how the product compared with a newer competitor, was not available on the startup’s website. Lim felt that this content gap would become even more critical as next-generation AI agents begin actively crawling the internet to gather intelligence for users.
It was clear that Warp needed to add more content, but making and uploading each additional web page was a time-consuming task involving a design agency and multiple people across different departments.
Marketers just cannot wait one month for design and development teams to build the page, she told TechCrunch. With AI engines, you need to be producing content a lot faster than before to capture your consumer demand.
Lim, who had long planned to launch a startup, recognized that this was fast becoming a problem that needed solving. So, in March, she co-founded Flint, an AI platform that lets you set up websites that update themselves. Joining her in the effort was Max Levenson, an engineer who previously led the simulation and infrastructure teams for autonomous vehicle startup Nuro.
On Tuesday, Flint emerged from stealth mode with five million dollars in seed funding. The investment was led by Accel, and saw participation from Sheryl Sandberg’s fund, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, and existing backer Neo.
Flint’s goal is to create websites that continuously optimize themselves, perform their own A/B tests, and dynamically learn from both visitors and market trends, such as a sudden interest in a specific keyword. Flint also aims to generate pages customized to each visitor, much like how Amazon shows you customized product recommendations.
That said, Flint’s technology is not ready to do all of that just yet. For now, users still have to tell us what they want to build, Lim said.
In its current form, once the parameters are set, Flint can automatically generate a webpage’s design and layout, interactive elements like tables and buttons, and also offer form tracking and ad optimization. Lim claims the platform can do all of this in about a day, though she did not give any more details.
At this point, customers provide their own copy, Lim said. She added that while Flint’s content writing functionality is roughly a year away, future versions will give customers the option to have AI write the text.
Even without that, Lim claims that whipping up a page with all of the necessary components in a day is already a big time-saver for its customers.
Flint says it does not design sites or vibe code anything. For existing websites, its technology analyzes the look and feel to build and deploy fully coded webpages that are consistent with the design.
The startup is already working with customers like Cognition, Modal, and Graphite, for whom it has created live pages.
Flint’s ambition is to help marketers at rapidly growing startups and Fortune 500 companies increase their websites’ visibility and create content.
The focus on selling to CMOs is what made Lim so excited to have Sheryl Sandberg join as an investor. I like to think of her as someone who has influenced the way the internet has monetized over the past decade, Lim said.
According to Lim, Sandberg instantly understood Flint’s vision. I was showing her this deck, and I was sharing how, in my personal experience, it took five teams three months to build one A/B test just to increase conversion by 10 percent on our Google ad, Lim said. And then she stopped me, said, ‘Michele, it was 140 people at Meta who had to do this’.