
A finance student automated the repetitive parts of his internships, learned to build with language models, and moved to San Francisco without a neat map. At Sherpa, Ethan Kinnan is betting that websites should learn from every visitor - and quietly rewrite themselves.
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.