conversion-rate-optimization
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King Kong Put Its Money Where the Marketing Metrics Are
The Melbourne agency built its pitch around a nerve-rattling promise: improve a qualified client’s results by 30 percent within 90 days, or keep working for free. Behind the swagger is a tightly engineered business of funnels, media buying, conversion work and sales education.
Sherpa
Sherpa is a San Francisco startup building an AI agent that makes websites improve themselves. It installs with a single line of code, studies how visitors behave, generates on-brand variants of pages and flows, runs A/B tests on live traffic, and ships the winners - all without a designer, developer, or analyst in the loop. Founded in 2026 by ex-Lindy engineers Ethan Kinnan and Norbu Sonam and backed by Y Combinator (Spring 2026 / P26 batch), Sherpa also optimizes sites for AI agents, tuning agent-facing pages so that assistants recommend a company more often. Early customers report 15-35% lifts in their primary conversion metric within the first 30-60 days.
Instant
Instant is a Sydney-founded, AI-powered retention marketing platform for ecommerce brands. It identifies anonymous shoppers, recovers abandoned carts and sends AI-generated email and SMS at the moment of highest purchase intent. After starting life as a one-click checkout tool in 2021, Instant pivoted to retention marketing and grew fast - more than 1,500 direct-to-consumer brands now use it, and the company says its AI-driven flows have generated over $1 billion in incremental revenue.
Product Genius
Product Genius is a Cambridge, Massachusetts AI company that builds a personalized, TikTok-style shopping feed for Shopify stores. Its platform, powered by what the company calls Large Interaction Models (LIMs), learns from each shopper's swipes, clicks and scrolls to assemble an individualized homepage of products, videos, reviews and Q&A. Founded by MIT PhD and deep-learning hardware pioneer Ben Vigoda, the company grew out of roughly $35 million in DARPA research and reports a median +20% lift in revenue per session, with controlled A/B tests showing a 36% average revenue lift across 25 brands including Betsey Johnson.
Replo
Replo is a San Francisco-based software company that lets ecommerce marketing teams design, launch, and test high-converting Shopify pages without writing code. Built around a visual drag-and-drop editor, hundreds of templates, live product-data integration, and increasingly AI-driven page generation, Replo targets mid-market direct-to-consumer brands that need custom landing pages and marketing funnels fast - without hiring engineers. Founded in 2021 by ex-Uber and PlanGrid engineers Yuxin Zhu and Noah Gilmore, the Y Combinator-backed startup has grown to thousands of ecommerce customers.
FERMÀT
FERMÀT is an AI-native commerce platform that builds personalized shopping experiences in the space between an ad click and checkout. Founded in 2021 by former LiveRamp executives Rishabh Jain and Shreyas Kumar, the San Francisco company gives brands no-code tools to spin up custom product pages, funnels, bundles, and dynamic offers, powered by a behavioral data layer it calls the Commerce Graph. It turns real shopper behavior into revenue, and its newer AI Search engine helps brands stay visible inside answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Rishabh Jain
Rishabh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of FERMÀT, a San Francisco AI-native commerce platform that builds personalized, content-native shopping experiences for direct-to-consumer and enterprise brands. A LiveRamp alum who saw Apple's privacy changes coming before most, he launched FERMÀT in late 2021 to rewire how brands sell when shoppers can no longer be tracked across the web. The company has raised roughly $86M across rounds, capped by a $45M Series B in June 2025, and counts Glossier, GNC, ILIA Beauty, BISSELL and Unilever's Olly among its customers.
Peep Laja
Peep Laja is an Estonian-born entrepreneur and marketing strategist who built three companies from scratch - CXL (marketing education), Speero (CRO consulting), and Wynter (B2B message testing) - all bootstrapped. Recognized as the world's most influential conversion rate optimization expert in 2016, he now focuses on B2B strategy and competitive positioning through his 'How to Win' podcast, biweekly newsletter, and daily LinkedIn presence with 69K+ followers.