Webflow, a web design and hosting platform that raised over $330 million at a $4 billion valuation, is expanding into a new area: marketing optimization.
Today, Webflow announced that it has acquired Smarten up, a startup that leverages artificial intelligence to personalize websites for unique visitors. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, a source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that the purchase price was in the “eight-figure” range.
The majority of the Intellimize team — about 50 people — will join Webflow. But some employees either took out-of-position packages or were let go and fired. The web feed wouldn’t say how many.
Vlad Magdalin, CEO of Webflow, said Intellimize was a natural fit for Webflow’s first acquisition because its product addresses a need shared by many Webflow customers: personalizing and optimizing their websites.
“The common thread among our many customer segments is that they create professional websites that are meant to not only look great, but ultimately drive business results — and many customers and partners have asked us to help them improve how well their websites they can bring them new customers beyond the initial construction phase,” Magdalin said. “Intellimize quickly emerged as a truly impressive product in this space that many marketing and development leaders loved – and it soon became very apparent that combining the strengths of our respective products and our teams could create a much more powerful combination.”
Guy Yalif, former head of vertical marketing at Twitter, co-founded Intellimize in 2016 with Brian Webb and Jin Lim. While in a previous executive role at Yahoo, Yalif worked with Lim, Yahoo’s vice president of engineering at the time, and Webb, who was an architect on Yahoo’s personalized content recommendations team. (Full disclosure: Yahoo is the corporate parent of TechCrunch.)
With Intellimize, Yalif, Webb and Lim — leveraging their combined marketing expertise — set out to build a platform that could create personalized websites for visitors on demand.
Motivation; Seventy-four percent of customers feel disappointed when a website’s content isn’t tailored, according to statistics reported by Porch Group Media. Companies that I am doing personalize report not only increased revenue, but also more effective marketing spend.
Update the faucets All included for building pages, automatically making adjustments based on how users behave (and where they come from). Companies create a website template, and then Intellimize’s AI runs experiments, fiddling with various knobs and dials as they were before delivering the top results to visitors.
Now, Intellimize isn’t the only one doing this.
Amazon’s Personalize can provide customized product and web search recommendations. Startups like Evolv AI and Episerver-owned Optimizely automate some forms of web A/B testing with algorithms. That’s not to mention AI-powered productivity platforms like Adobe’s GenStudio, Movable Ink, Mutiny, and Blend, which are rushing into new and emerging forms of experience personalization.
However, Intellimize – whether through technology, partnerships or advertising – has managed to establish a significant foothold in the market for AI-based marketing.
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 positive customers, including Sumo Logic, Dermalogica and ZoomInfo.
“The Intellimize team had already built most of the personalization and optimization tools we were thinking of building in-house and had an impressive list of enterprise customers using their solution,” said Magdalin. “Their team and product have demonstrated world-class expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance website personalization and conversion rate optimization, which we believe would be a very powerful addition to Webflow’s existing platform.”
So what changes can Intellimize customers expect as the company joins the Webflow fold? Not many upsets, Yalif stressed. Intellimize will continue to be sold standalone to non-Webflow customers, but will increasingly connect to – and integrate with – Webflow services. Yalif, meanwhile, will join Webflow as “head of personalization,” leading — what else? — Product personalization efforts in Webflow.
“Participating in Webflow allows us to scale and significantly accelerate our push forward,” said Yalif. “Webflow develops its end-to-end solution for building, designing and optimizing websites. Intellimize is the foundation of the personalization and optimization pieces of this vision. Together, we can take on bigger, much more expensive, more difficult-to-use players in the digital experience space.”
Here is Magdalin’s take:
“Integrating Intellimize expands our core audience beyond designers and developers… For the initial phase [of the merger]we’re focused on natively integrating both of our products together — so customers should expect the best of Webflow and the best of Intellimize to be available as a unified product experience later this year.”
