Flint, backed by Sheryl Sandberg, wants to use AI to autonomously build and update websites.

You may only discover problems after you’ve been involved in the process for a while. Similarly, Michelle Lim was running Warp’s growth marketing efforts until last year when she noticed that the company wasn’t updating its website quickly enough.

She noticed that potential customers were asking ChatGPT and other AI bots all sorts of questions about Warp’s products, but the information they were looking for, such as how the product compared to new competitors, wasn’t available on the startup’s website. Lim felt that this content gap would become even more significant as next-generation AI agents begin to actively crawl the internet and gather information about users.

It was clear that Warp needed to add more content, but creating and uploading each additional web page was a time-consuming task involving multiple people from the design firm and various departments.

“Marketers can’t wait a month for design and development teams to build pages,” she told TechCrunch. “With AI engines, we need to create content much faster than before to capture consumer demand.”

Lim had been planning to launch a startup for a long time, but realized this was rapidly becoming a problem to solve. So in March, she co-founded Flint, an AI platform that lets you set up websites that update automatically. Joining her efforts is Max Levenson, an engineer who previously led the simulation and infrastructure team at self-driving car startup Nuro.

On Tuesday, Flint came out of stealth mode with $5 million in seed funding. The investment was led by Accel, with participation from Sheryl Sandberg’s fund, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, and existing backer Neo.

Flint’s goal is to create a website that continuously optimizes, runs its own A/B tests, and dynamically learns from both its visitors and market trends, such as sudden interest in specific keywords. Flint also aims to generate customized pages for each visitor, similar to how Amazon displays customized product recommendations.

But Flint’s technology isn’t ready to do all that yet. “For now, users still have to tell us what they want to build,” Lim said.

In its current form, once parameters are set, Flint automatically generates the web page design and layout, interactive elements (such as tables and buttons), and also provides form tracking and advertising optimization. Lim claims the platform can do all of this in “about a day,” but declined to provide further details.

“At the moment, customers provide their own copies,” Lim said. He added that while Flint’s content writing capabilities are about a year away, future versions will give customers the option of having the AI ​​write the text.

Even without that, Lim claims that customers can already create a page with all the necessary components in a day, which is a huge time-saver.

Flint said he didn’t do any design or “atmosphere code” for the site. For existing websites, the technology analyzes the look and feel and builds and deploys fully coded web pages that match the design.

The startup is already working with customers such as Cognition, Modal, and Graphite to create live pages for them. Windsurf can be found here on the Modal site. And this is what Graphite looks like.

Mr. Flint’s goal is to help marketers at high-growth startups and Fortune 500 companies increase website visibility and content creation.

With a focus on selling to CMOs, Lim was excited to have Sheryl Sandberg join as an investor. “I consider her to be someone who has influenced the way the internet has been monetized over the past decade,” Lim said.

Lim said Sandberg immediately understood Flint’s vision. “I showed her this material and shared that in my personal experience, it took five teams three months to build one A/B test just to increase conversions by 10% in Google Ads,” Lim said. “And she stopped me, [and] I said, “Michelle, there were 140 people at Meta who had to do this.”