Webflow, an online design and hosting platform that has raised over $330 million at a $4 billion valuation, is expanding right into a latest sector: marketing optimization.
Today Webflow announced the acquisition Intellimize, a startup that uses AI to personalize web sites for individual visitors. The terms of the contract weren’t disclosed. However, a source acquainted with the matter told TechCrunch that the acquisition price was within the “eight figures.”
The majority of the Intellimize team – around 50 people – will join Webflow. But some employees either accepted outplacement packages or were laid off and given severance pay; Webflow wouldn't say what number of.
Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin said Intellimize was a natural fit for Webflow's first-ever acquisition because its product meets a necessity that many Webflow customers share: personalizing and optimizing their web sites.
“The commonality across our many customer segments is that they construct skilled web sites that not only look great, but additionally ultimately drive business results – and countless of our customers and partners have asked us to assist them improve what their web sites are able to “to get them latest customers beyond the initial creation phase,” said Magdalin. “Intellimize quickly became a really impressive product on this space, with many marketing and growth leaders raving about it – and it quickly became clear that combining the strengths of our respective products and our teams could create a way more powerful combination.”
Guy Yalif, former head of vertical marketing at Twitter, founded Intellimize in 2016 with Brian Webb and Jin Lim. During his previous leadership role at Yahoo, Yalif worked with Lim, then vice chairman of engineering at Yahoo, and Webb, an architect on the Yahoo team for personalized content recommendations. (Full disclosure: Yahoo is TechCrunch's parent company.)
With Intellimize, Yalif, Webb and Lim – drawing on their combined marketing expertise – got down to construct a platform that may generate personalized web pages for visitors on demand.
The motivation? 74 percent of shoppers feel comfortable frustrated when an internet site's content will not be customized, in accordance with statistics cited by Porch Group Media. Companies that personalize report not only increased revenue, but additionally more efficient marketing spend.
Smartening faucets AI to generate pages and robotically make adjustments in response to users' behavior (and where they arrive from). Companies create an internet site template, then Intellimize's AI runs experiments, fidgeting with different buttons and dials, so to talk, before delivering the best-performing results to visitors.
Now Intellimize isn't the just one doing this.
Amazon Personalize can generate tailored product and search recommendations across the net. Startups like Evolv AI and Episerver-owned Optimizely automate certain types of A/B web testing with algorithms. Not to say generative AI-driven platforms like GenStudio, Movable Ink, Mutiny, and Adobe’s Blend are driving latest and novel types of experience personalization.
But Intellimize, whether through its technology, partnerships or promoting, is managing to realize a foothold within the AI-powered marketing market.
At the time of the acquisition, Intellimize – which had raised over $50 million from investors including Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners and Homebrew – had several tentpole customers including Sumo Logic, Dermalogica and ZoomInfo.
“The Intellimize team had already built many of the personalization and optimization tools we wanted to construct in-house and had a formidable list of enterprise customers using their solution,” Magdalin said. “Their team and product have demonstrated world-class expertise in machine learning and AI to drive website personalization and conversion rate optimization. We imagine this is able to be a really powerful addition to Webflow’s existing platform.”
So what changes can Intellimize customers expect as the corporate joins the Webflow group? Not many disruptive ones, emphasized Yalif. Intellimize continues to be sold standalone to non-Webflow customers, nevertheless it is increasingly linked to and integrated with Webflow services. Yalif, meanwhile, will join Webflow as “head of personalization” and – what else? — Personalization product efforts at Webflow.
“Joining Webflow allows us to scale and significantly speed up our forward momentum,” said Yalif. “Webflow is expanding its integrated solution for creating, designing and optimizing web sites. Intellimize is the inspiration of the personalization and optimization parts of this vision. Together we are able to tackle larger, way more expensive and harder to make use of players within the digital experience space.”
Here is Magdalin's opinion:
“Integrating Intellimize expands our primary audience beyond designers and developers…In the early stages (of the merger), we're focused on native integration between our two products – so customers can expect the most effective of Webflow and the most effective of Intellimize.” Available later this 12 months as a unified product experience.”
