web flowA web hosting and design platform that has raised more than $330 million at a $4 billion valuation, is expanding into a new sector: marketing optimization.
Today, Webflow announced that it acquired Intelimize, a startup that leverages artificial intelligence to personalize websites for unique visitors. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But a source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that the purchase price was in the “eight-figure” range.
Most of the Intellimize team (around 50 people) will join Webflow. But some employees accepted outplacement packages or were laid off and received severance pay; Webflow did not say how many.
Vlad Magdalin, CEO of Webflow, said Intellimize was a natural choice for Webflow’s first acquisition because its product fills a need many Webflow customers share: personalizing and optimizing their websites.
“The common thread among our many customer segments is that they are creating professional websites that are intended to not only look great, but also drive business results, and many of our customers and partners have asked us to help them improve performance. Their websites can attract new customers beyond the initial creation phase,” Magdalin said. “Intellimize quickly emerged as a truly impressive product in this space that many marketing and growth leaders praised, and it soon became very apparent that combining the strengths of our respective products and our teams can 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 recommendation team. (Full disclosure: Yahoo is the parent company of TechCrunch.)
With Intellimize, Yalif, Webb and Lim, leveraging their combined marketing knowledge, set out to build a platform that could generate personalized web pages for visitors on demand.
The motivation? Seventy-four percent of customers feel frustrated when a website’s content is not personalized, according to statistics cited by Porch Group Media. Companies that do personalize report not only higher revenue, but also more efficient marketing spend.
Smartize faucets AI to generate pages, automatically making adjustments in response to how users behave (and where they come from). Businesses create a website template, then Intellimize’s AI runs experiments, fiddling with various knobs and dials before delivering the best results to visitors.
Now, Intellimize is not the only one that does this.
Amazon’s Personalize can generate personalized search and product recommendations across the web. Startups like Evolv AI and Episerver-owned Optimizely automate certain forms of A/B web testing with algorithms. That’s not to mention AI-powered generative platforms like Adobe’s GenStudio, mobile ink, Riot and Mixthat are accelerating in new and innovative ways of personalizing experiences.
But Intellimize, whether thanks to its technology, partnerships or advertising, manages to establish a considerable foothold in the AI-powered marketing market.
At the time of the acquisition, Intellimize, which had raised more than $50 million from investors including Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners and Homebrew, had several notable clients, including Sumo Logic, Dermalogica and ZoomInfo.
“The Intellimize team had already built most of the customization and optimization tools we were considering building in-house and had an impressive list of enterprise customers using their solution,” Magdalin said. “Their team and product demonstrated world-class expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence to drive 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 when the company joins the Webflow group? Not many disruptors, Jalif emphasized. Intellimize will continue to be sold independently to non-Webflow customers, but will increasingly be tied to and integrated with Webflow services. Meanwhile, Yalif will join Webflow as “head of personalization,” guiding – what else? – Product customization efforts in Webflow.
“Joining Webflow allows us to significantly scale and accelerate our momentum,” said Yalif. “Webflow is developing its integrated solution for website creation, design and optimization. Intellimize is the foundation of the personalization and optimization pieces of that vision. “Together, we can take on bigger, much more expensive and harder-to-use players in the digital experience space.”
Here is Magdalin’s opinion:
“The integration of Intellimize expands our core audience beyond designers and developers… For the initial phase [of the merger]“We are focusing on natively integrating both products, so customers should expect the best of Webflow and the best of Intellimize to be available as a unified product experience later this year.”