Testing Company Optimizely Raises $58M As It Moves Into Personalization

Optimizely, the company that has become synonymous with A/B testing, has raised $58 million in Series C funding.

Optimizely has now raised a total of $146 million. The new round was led by Index Ventures, with general partner Ilya Fushman joining Optimizely’s board of directors. Also participating in the funding were past investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, Benchmark, Citi Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Danhua Capital, Pharus Capital Management, Salesforce Ventures and Tenaya Capital.

The company says that its revenue has more than doubled since it raised its Series B in May 2014. And while Optimizely is best known for tools that allow customers to test different variants of their website and find the one that performs best (something co-founder and CEO Dan Siroker previously did for the Obama campaign), it’s been moving into new areas, with the launch of Optimizely for iOS last year, and most recently, the release of Optimizely Personalization.

Siroker (pictured above at the company’s Opticon event) noted that Optimizely has become the top service for optimizing websites (according to Alexa) and mobile apps (according to MixRank). Customers include CNN, Microsoft and Virgin America.

And while plenty of other companies have released their own A/B testing tools, Siroker said Optimizely remains distinguished by the strategy of building “best in class products” and then integrating with a variety of partners.

As for personalization, Siroker said that in some ways, it’s similar to the state of A/B testing five years ago, around the time that Optimizely launched. Personalization has become a “dirty word,” he said, because “the existing technology vendors have over-promised and under-delivered.”

Siroker added that while Optimizely offers a product that “just works,” it’s not simply handing customers “a magical black box.” Instead, it’s allowing them to customize the product to their own needs, creating “that symbiosis of creativity and technology.” And while Optimizely’s emphasis has been on making products that are usable by “mere marketing mortals,” he’s also hoping to expand to other teams within a business.

“Ultimately, our goal is to optimize every experience,” Siroker said. “We think this funding will help take us a step closer.”

You can read more about Optimizely’s future plans on the company blog.