01

Corte

The AI media platform that takes a site from built to seen.

pre-seed · seed   —   2026   —   corte.so

02

02 The insight

“At Squarespace I learned that building a site is easy. Populating it with content is hard. Growing traffic is harder.”

Every tool in this category solves the easy part.

03

03 The problem

The difficulty curve

Build

Solved, many times over — every builder, template and framework here.

Fill

Nobody has solved it. You sit in an empty editor with placeholder text, starting from a blank page.

Grow

Unsolved, and compounding. A site nobody visits is indistinguishable from no site.

The industry has spent a decade perfecting the first ten percent of the job.

04

04 The problem, continued

Churn at both ends

One arc, two exits. An all-in-one platform loses customers at both ends of the same lifecycle — and both losses are structural, not features to be added.

The bottom end

A large share of sites get little or no traffic. That customer pays a subscription against nothing — and no return is what churn is made of. They don’t leave because the product is bad; they leave because nothing came back.

needs your number [FILL: share of sites with little or no traffic — cite a public source]
The top end

The sites that do grow eventually “outgrow the platform” — the in-house name for it, because it’s the real phrase customers use. When the platform is all-in-one, outgrowing one part means ejecting from all of it. The customer who succeeded most is the one the platform is structurally guaranteed to lose.

The better the customer does, the more certain the exit. Success and failure both end in the same place.

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05 Why now

The classic $20,000 website

The advice currently circulating says it plainly: here’s everything you need to build a $20k website.

01
Claude Code
the agent that writes it
02
a UI/UX design skill
the taste that shapes it
03
21st.dev
the components it’s built from
04
a scroll-world skill
the cinematic entrance
05
an image / video generation MCP
the media it’s filled with

Assemble all five and you have a beautiful site on your laptop that nobody can visit.

not included — hosting · a domain · a CMS · translation · analytics · an audience

06

06 The solution

One platform, five surfaces

All five of the last stack are one product here — and the list keeps on past launch.

Create

Generate image, video and audio across 32 models, plus 47 one-click applications.

Edit

A real multitrack timeline with captions, colour and multicam, an AI editing agent, and watermark-free export from the browser.

Automate

Node-canvas pipelines, with 24 templates and a copilot.

Collaborate

Shared projects with pooled billing, and community templates.

Build

The site itself — generated, hosted, deployed, with a REST API, an MCP server and a plugin SDK.

07

07 The argument

One platform's skills, tuned to its own pipeline

The stack on the last slide is five vendors, five bills and five things to keep working. Ours are one platform’s skills — tuned against our own media pipeline and our own model lane. When the design skill calls for generation or a clip, it runs the same pipeline that bills the customer, on our own models.

Platform skills

A platform skill is one packaged procedure a build can run — a scroll-world camera flight, a design system, a media pipeline. Same engine, same bill, one thing to maintain.

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08 Past the finish line

What ships after the site

Content

CMS with a real editing substrate and revisions — not a wall of empty fields.

Translation

Per-field localisation with fallback chains — one site, every market it sells to.

Analytics

Per-site traffic for the customer’s deployed site, separate from our own telemetry.

Growth

Scheduled publishing across channels, tracked links, campaign calendars and a review gate before anything posts.

Each exists so the subscription has something to show for itself — not to justify the last upgrade. Growth is the point, not a feature.

Free tier

A free tier that carries platform promotion. A site that isn't yet earning its keep still earns its hosting by introducing the next person — how a customer with no traffic stays long enough to get some, and a channel that grows with every site we host.

Not just getting you started — making you go.

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09 Proof it is real

Shipped, not roadmap

32
generation models
47
one-click applications
24
workflow templates
82
UI components in our own registry
16
first-party connectors
41
hosted MCP connections
71
help-centre articles

Every figure is a count of what exists in the product today — a catalog, not a plan.

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10 Scale & performance

Production, not prototypes

The sites we produce are not toys. Deployed to the edge; a fresh app reaches a live preview in [FILL: median time-to-first-preview, current production number], not minutes. Per-deploy isolation means one customer’s render never touches another’s. Images run through edge transformation with format negotiation — right format, right size, on the first request. And storage is a hard quota with no surprise overage.

product screenDeploy → live preview flow goes here.
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11 The market

The one already building — and everything after

TAM
needs your number [FILL: reference: website builders + creative tooling]

Website builders and creative tooling. Add your own market-sizing source.

SAM
needs your number [FILL: reference: AI-native site + media builders]

AI-native site & media platforms that compete for the same budget.

SOM
needs your number [FILL: reference: our beachhead]

The beachhead we actually go after first — bounded by the segment we can realistically reach.

Framing only — the size needs your own sources. We sell to the person who has already decided to build, and keep them for everything that happens next.

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12 Business model

Credits, plus subscriptions

PlanPriceCreditsStorage
Free$05 GB
Standard$10/mo1,000 credits100 GB
Pro$30/mo3,500 credits500 GB
Max$80/mo10,000 credits1 TB
Yearly is 20% off. 100 credits = $1. Purchased credits never expire. Editing and export are free — and never watermarked — on every plan.

Why it holds: consumption revenue grows with the customer’s success rather than their headcount.

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13 Unit economics

The owned model lane

We self-host our own video model rather than reselling someone else’s inference. Ten seconds of 720p video with sound costs the customer 10 credits. Same clip, bought through a commodity API, would cost them much more — and our margin only improves as more of the catalogue moves onto our own lane.

$0.90
resold through a commodity API
$0.10
our price — 10 credits
$0.06
our compute cost

We set the price on our own lane instead of marking up someone else’s.

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14 Retention by architecture

Take one slice, pay for that slice

Composable and metered, so growth never forces an exit. Each of these is a real entry point that stands on its own:

The media pipeline on its own

Triggered from a webhook or an API call, automating product shoots — with nothing else adopted.

The headless CMS on its own

With or without automated translation.

The Agents platform on its own

Stands alone; no need to adopt the editor.

The website builder on its own

A complete, hosted site — one slice, not the suite.

Your own editor

The site is a GitHub repo you have access to — edit it from any tool you already use, without coming back to our builder.

Your own codebase

An existing Next.js site can be brought in that never started here at all.

Adoption is incremental — arrive through any one slice, so is the reverse: grow past one part, keep the others, metered for what you use. Graduation stops being an exit.

And because it is metered, the price follows usage — the customer who succeeds most is worth the most, not the one about to leave.

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15 Traction

Kept, paid for, and growing

needs your number [FILL: weekly active accounts]needs your number [FILL: paying accounts]needs your number [FILL: MRR and growth rate]needs your number [FILL: retention / cohort curve]needs your number [FILL: sites deployed]
growth curve[FILL: chart — active accounts over time]
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16 Team

One person, eleven years inside the problem

Solo founder — currently the only person on the team

Two careers rarely find each other in one person. This is that person — craft first, then scale.

The craft half

Years working in and with high-end agencies — building highly polished sites and online presence for real brands, to the quality bar clients pay agency rates for.

The scale half

Eleven years as Principal Engineer at Squarespace — building and scaling the content management systems underneath thousands of sites.

Two halves, one person

Rarely together. One knows how a site must look to be worth having; the other knows what it takes to build, host and scale it for everyone.

This deck's thesis — build is easy, content is hard, traffic is harder — comes from having stood at both ends.

Everything so far — sections five through twelve, shipped from this one person.

needs your number [FILL: advisors]needs your number [FILL: planned key hires]

Advisors and hires follow the raise — not the other way around.

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17 The ask

The money buys the team, the platform, and the runway

needs your number [FILL: amount raising]needs your number [FILL: instrument]
Engineering
needs your number [FILL: %]
Model infrastructure
needs your number [FILL: %]
Go to market
needs your number [FILL: %]
Runway
needs your number [FILL: %]

Not just getting you started — making you go.

Corte
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