Bryant Chou

Chou earned a BS in computer engineering from UCSD. Early on he developed one of the first mobile push-to-talk apps on the Android market.⁠[1]

In 2008 Chou was an engineer at Intuit, where he spent about three years and met his future Webflow co-founder Vlad Magdalin. He recalled that 30 minutes into his first day he was taken to a customer’s office to watch them use QuickBooks, part of a “Customer Follow-Me Home” program required of all new hires.⁠[2]

At Intuit he was lead software engineer on Intuit Brainstorm. He recalled that he and Magdalin built an internal tool to track ideas across Intuit, later productized as Intuit’s first enterprise SaaS product, and that the experience showed him how archaic building for the web was at the time.⁠[1][3]

In 2011 Chou joined Vungle, an in-app video advertising platform, as founding CTO, a role he held until 2013. He architected its core tech stack, including an iOS SDK installed on more than 60 million phones and a node.js cluster handling more than 250 million HTTP requests per day.⁠[2][1][4]

Vlad Magdalin went full-time on Webflow in July 2012 and enlisted his younger brother, the designer Sergie Magdalin. Chou recalled that Vlad approached him in late 2012 or early 2013, and that what convinced him was Sergie’s account of designers being unable to turn their own designs into websites. In 2013 Chou officially joined as a co-founder.⁠[2][3]

Webflow launched a beta on Hacker News in March 2013, was then accepted into Y Combinator in 2013, and launched the full product two weeks before Demo Day, gaining 25,000 signups and $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue in the first two weeks.⁠[2]

Chou served as co-founder and CTO of Webflow and also headed marketing. He recalled that during the company’s fastest growth periods he started its sales and marketing teams while building the product as CTO.⁠[5][6]

He recalled that Webflow insisted the platform output the same code a developer would write, which helped it win over technical users, and that when organic growth leveled off he pursued a “growth engineering” strategy that included designing flexboxgame.com to drive awareness. At the time of a March 2023 interview, Webflow had last been valued at more than $4 billion and had more than 3.5 million users.⁠[3]

In January 2020 he appeared on the Software Engineering Daily podcast to discuss the engineering problems Webflow had worked through.⁠[7]

His tenure at Webflow ran from 2013 to 2025, twelve years in total.⁠[4][6]

Chou founded Ploy in 2025, his third company. Ploy is an AI growth platform built around a company’s website, whose agents design pages, write copy, run campaigns, optimize performance and sync data back to a CRM. The company was part of Y Combinator’s Spring 2026 batch and is based in San Francisco.⁠[4][6]

On June 15, 2026, Chou, as co-founder and CEO, announced that Ploy was generally available and had raised a $27 million seed round led by First Round CapitalFirst Round CapitalVenture capital firm.Open the full entry and Y Combinator, with angel investors including Lenny Rachitsky, Ben Lang and Eoghan McCabe. Ploy then had teams in San Francisco and New York, and its customers included Hex and Clay.⁠[6][8]

In the funding announcement he wrote that in an era of AI answer engines and agents browsing on users’ behalf, a company’s website “becomes the one thing you fully own and control,” and so “can’t be a brochure you ship and forget.”⁠[6]

Ploy: Official website: https://ploy.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

Webflow: Official website: https://webflow.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

X: Public account: https://x.com/bryantchou (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryantchou (opens in a new window).⁠[4]