Former Webflow CTO Bryant Chou launches Ploy with $27 million in seed funding to automate website operations

AI is making marketers lazy.

So we made the website do the work instead. Today, we're launching @ployai: the all-in-one marketing platform that turns your website into your hardest working employee.

And we're coming out of stealth today with a $27M seed led by @ycombinator and @firstround.

I spent 12 years at Webflow as the founding CTO where I built the product, but also started our marketing and sales teams that drove our fastest periods of growth. That experience made one thing obvious: the website is the center of your business. And it's only more important in the age of AI.

Foundation model apps can generate assets. Point solutions can optimize pieces of the funnel.

But nothing runs the whole growth system: your site, brand, CMS, CRM, campaigns, analytics, SEO, AEO, and customer data all working together.

Until now.

Teams at @hex_tech and @clay_run, and growth agencies like Tonik and TNT Growth, are already powering sites on Ploy. Hex is generating on-brand ABM pages at scale, Clay is using its data to power a programmatic SEO engine, and TNT Growth is spinning up a landing page for each of their clients’ ads.

Wake up every morning with a report from Ploy - with what it did, and what it wants to do next. Approve it. Ship it. Or be lazy and just watch it cook.

Back in 2013, when I was starting Cover, I was introduced to @bryantchou. I was so impressed by his technical chops and raw intensity that I tried to hire him as our founding engineer. He politely declined to start his own new company instead, called Webflow.

But we stayed in touch. I followed his journey at Webflow for the next 12 years, watching him flourish as co-founder and CTO — but also the person who ran sales and marketing during the company’s fastest period of growth. He’s one of those rare engineers who understands the product, the customer and business equally.

Today, Bryant is launching Ploy (@ployai), and @firstround is proud to be backing it alongside Y Combinator.

Most marketing teams spend more time on operations than creative execution. Bryant felt this pain acutely at Webflow, which some marketers call “measureship” — stitching tools together, building dashboards, chasing attribution. So much of the craft of marketing gets buried in this overhead.

Ploy is a marketing platform that treats your website as the hub and all your growth channels as spokes. Agents handle the work end-to-end: designing pages, writing copy and running campaigns. It creates a loop that brings your static website to life, learning from traffic and acting on signals in real time.

As agents browse on behalf of users and LLMs summarize your content, your website is the source of truth they pull from. It matters more in the AI era, not less.

Hex is already using Ploy for account-based marketing, scaling the creation of personalized landing pages without waiting on engineering. Clay uses Ploy to run programmatic SEO, turning one-off builds into a content engine.

Congrats to Bryant and the whole Ploy team. Insanely excited to see where this goes.