Optimizely Raises $58 Million to Optimize the World

Every morning, we all wake up to a world that isn’t optimized. Reading the news, commuting to work, ordering coffee, planning a vacation; far too few of these experiences were optimized using data. As a result, our lives are filled with experiences that are never as good as they could be.

Optimizely is an Experience Optimization Platform and our vision is to enable the world to turn data into action. We believe optimization can transform how companies create experiences for their customers. When Pete Koomen and I founded Optimizely five years ago, very few companies had even heard of AB Testing, and optimization software was about the last thing anyone considered putting in their technology stack.

Fast forward to 2015 and much has changed. Optimizely is the most-adopted website optimization platform among the Alexa top 10,000 websites and within the last year has quickly become the number one mobile app optimization platform for iOS, powered by feature flagging. And, for the last five years we’ve more than doubled revenue every single year.

While we’re very proud of these achievements, the truth of the matter is we’re just starting to scratch the surface. Not nearly enough companies embrace testing, and we still live in a mostly unoptimized world.

Optimizely wants to change that. It’s going to be a long journey, one filled with victories and challenges along the way. And it might get frustrating or even a little scary at times, but it’s a journey well worth taking, and we want you to take it with us.

Focusing on the Long-Term

Today is an exciting day because we’ve secured $58 million in Series C funding, led by Index Ventures. I’m thrilled that Ilya Fushman, General Partner at Index Ventures, is joining Optimizely’s Board of Directors. He brings a wealth of experience to Optimizely and has plenty of thoughts on optimization.

For us, our customers, and our partners, this new round of funding represents an opportunity for Optimizely to focus on our long-term objectives of building products that will enable every company to provide their customers with the best possible experiences.

One of the most important reasons we’ve raised this money is to further invest in personalization. Personalization has become a dirty word in our industry because vendors have consistently over promised and under delivered. Instead of making a promise we can’t keep, we’re excited to show the world how Optimizely Personalization will finally deliver on that promise. Optimizely Personalization, the latest addition to our Experience Optimization Platform, is a solution that allows you to offer your customers uniquely personal experiences without needing dozens of engineers or an army of analysts. Further, it’s a solution that promotes a core tenet of Optimizely’s approach to building products: enablement. We want to enable you to harness your creativity to deliver a great experience, and not have to worry about the underlying technology. We’re doing for personalization what we did for A/B Testing: offer a product that just works.

The future of optimization looks very bright and we’re so excited about enabling companies to optimize every experience. And it’s important that we give thanks to our customers and partners for making us the most adopted optimization platform in the world. This is an amazing journey and we’re so grateful to be taking it with you.