Apptimize Raises $4M As It Expands Its Mobile Optimization Tools Beyond A/B Testing

Mobile A/B testing service Apptimize has raised $4 million in Series A funding — and it just launched a new product that moves the company beyond testing.

Co-founder and CEO Nancy Hua told me that the new Instant Update feature allows customers to use Apptimize’s visual editor to make small changes to their app, even if they’re not going through the standard process of testing different variants. Want to tweak some text or move a button? With Instant Update, you should be able to do it quickly, without writing any code, talking to a developer or waiting for app store approval. (You can go here to demo the editor for yourself.)

Hua said this should make Apptimize useful to smaller customers, not just the big companies that she’s focused on till now. Not that she regrets landing big names – Hua said there are currently “a few hundred” apps using Apptimize, but she was more interested in highlighting the fact that apps like Vevo, HotelTonight, Glassdoor, Strava, and Flipagram use the product.

“I can say with a lot more certainty now that we’re installed on your device,” she said.

Still, it can’t hurt to cast a wider net, and the new features should also keep Apptimize competitive as other companies launch their own mobile testing tools.

Hua added that the bigger vision behind Instant Update is to position developers so they’re “innovating really fast.” That’s particularly important now, as the mobile landscape becomes increasingly competitive — even if you’ve got one hit app, you might not be able to sustain that lead, or follow up with equally popular products.

“If you think about your favorite app, if you think about how many product iterations it takes to get that app that perfect, that smooth, it’s literally hundreds if not thousands,” she said.

And she argued that Apptimize can accelerate that process, shrinking the time between iterations from months or weeks to minutes.

Granted, you can’t use Instant Update to introduce entirely new features, but Hua said it’s often “the small stuff” that’s occupying developers’ time. For example, she said the process of signing up new users is usually “not a fundamental innovation,” but teams have to spend a lot of time on it. Apptimize can make it quicker to tweak and improve the on-boarding process, freeing more time to work on the big stuff.

As for the new funding, it was led by Costanoa Venture Capital and brings Apptimize’s total funding to $6.1 million.