Webflow, a web design and hosting platform that has raised more than $330 million at a valuation of $4 billion, is expanding into a new sector: marketing optimization.
Today, Webflow announced the acquisition of Intellimize, a startup leveraging AI to personalize websites for unique visitors. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the purchase price was in the “eight-figure” range.
The majority of the Intellimize team, approximately 50 people, will join Webflow. But some staff members either accepted outplacement programs or were laid off and given severance; Webflow would not say how much.
Vlad Magdalin, CEO of Webflow, said Intellimize was a natural choice for Webflow’s first-ever acquisition because its product addresses a need shared by many Webflow customers: to personalize and optimize their websites.
“What our many customer segments have in common is that they create professional websites intended not only to look good, but also to drive business results. Tons of our customers and partners have asked us to help them improve their quality. their websites are able to bring them new customers beyond the initial construction phase,” Magdalin said. “Intellimize quickly emerged as a truly impressive product in this space that many marketing and growth leaders praised – and it quickly became very apparent that combining the strengths of our respective products and 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 leadership role at Yahoo, Yalif worked with Lim, Yahoo’s vice president of engineering at the time, and Webb, who was an architect on the personalized content recommendation team from Yahoo. (Full disclosure: Yahoo is the parent company of TechCrunch.)
With Intellimize, Yalif, Webb and Lim, leveraging their combined marketing know-how, set out to create a platform that could generate personalized web pages for visitors on demand.
Motivation? Seventy-four percent of customers feel frustrated when a website’s content isn’t personalized, according to statistics cited by Porch Group Media. Companies that TO DO customize the report not only on increased revenue but also more effective marketing spend.
Intellimize uses AI to generate pages, automatically making adjustments based on user behavior (and where they’re coming from). Businesses create a website template, then Intellimize’s AI runs experiments, manipulating various buttons and dials before delivering the best-performing results to visitors.
Intellimize is not the only one doing this.
Amazon Personalize can generate personalized product and search recommendations across the web. Startups such as Evolv AI and Episerver-owned Optimizely are automating some forms of web A/B testing with algorithms. Not to mention AI-driven generative platforms like GenStudio, Movable Ink, Mutiny, and Adobe’s Blend, which are rushing into new forms of experience personalization.
But Intellimize, whether through its technology, partnerships or advertising, is managing to gain a significant foothold in the AI-driven 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 anchor clients, including Sumo Logic, Dermalogica and ZoomInfo.
“The Intellimize team had already created most of the personalization and optimization tools we planned to build in-house, and had an impressive list of enterprise customers using their solution,” Magdalin said. “Their team and product have demonstrated world-class expertise in machine learning and AI to power website personalization and conversion rate optimization, which we believe would be a very powerful addition to the existing Webflow platform.
So what changes can Intellimize customers expect as the company joins the Webflow fold? Not much disruption, Yalif stressed. Intellimize will continue to be sold standalone to non-Webflow customers, but it will increasingly be linked to and integrated with Webflow services. Yalif, meanwhile, will join Webflow as “head of personalization,” guiding — what else? — personalization product efforts at Webflow.
“Joining Webflow allows us to scale and significantly accelerate our momentum,” Yalif said. “Webflow develops its integrated solution for website creation, design and optimization. Intellimize is the foundation of the personalization and optimization elements of this vision. Together, we can take on bigger, much more expensive, and harder-to-play players in the digital experience space.
Here is Magdalin’s point of view:
“The Intellimize integration expands our core audience beyond designers and developers… For the initial phase (of the merger), we are focused on natively integrating our two products together — so customers should consider expect the best from Webflow and the best from Intellimize. available as a unified product experience later this year.
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