Dropbox Buys E-Commerce A/B Testing Service Predictive Edge, Shuts It Down

Dropbox has made another acquisition: Predictive Edge, a startup that had built a way to personalise e-commerce offerings, along with dynamic pricing, for marketers to send out to users and run A/B tests around them.

The service will be shut down, and the founders will be working on something different, as they note in an announcement on the site:

Predictive Edge is joining forces with Dropbox!,” the company writes. “Going forward we’ll be focused on solving problems outside the world of A/B testing. As of today, you can no longer sign-up for our service, and we’ve informed current customers that our product will no longer be supported. Many thanks to you all for your feedback & support, and here’s to a new chapter!

A new — and intriguing — chapter. The founders note that they’re not continuing to develop this product, and it’s tempting to wonder how and if any of that technology will be applied in whatever they tackle next. Hu’s LinkedIn profile notes that he is now “building Mailbox at Dropbox.”

Predictive Edge was working in what is an emerging and growing area of e-commerce: dynamic pricing, used by the likes of Uber for surge pricing, but also e-commerce sites to present different prices depending on who is doing the looking.

This is Dropbox’s 17th acquisition, with five of the last six of companies focused on services for enterprises — if you were in doubt about how Dropbox is laying the groundwork for a more concerted push to drive more sales from business users.

Predictive Edge was started in 2010 by two graduates from Stanford and one from the University of Pennsylvania: Kevin Liu (from U Penn), Steven Wu and Marty Hu (both from Stanford), and it was part of the university’s StartX accelerator.

It’s not clear how much money Predictive Edge had raised, or the financial terms of this deal, but Great Oaks was the startup’s lead investor, with another backer being Zach Weinberg, a co-founder at Flatiron Health, among other things.