What if ecommerce and retail websites could be dynamically, autonomously personalized for every visitor? That’s the idea behind Intellimize, a San Mateo, California-based startup that today announced it’s raised $8 million in series A funding led by Amplify Partners, with Homebrew, Precursor Ventures, and several angel investors participating. Together with a previously unannounced $2 million series A round, it brings the startup’s total raised to $10 million.
The way cofounder and CEO Guy Yalif tells it, Intellimize didn’t have to look long and hard for customers. Within three months of the company’s launch, it was generating revenue, and revenue in the past two years was up a whopping 1,338%.
“Last year, marketers spent $100 billion in paid media to drive traffic to websites, yet 98% of those visitors left without becoming customers,” Yalif said. “Traditional website optimization approaches like A/B testing try to solve this problem, but treat everyone the same forever and significantly limit test speed. We addressed these frustrations and more by dynamically personalizing for each unique visitor in real time.”
Yalif, who was previously head of global product and vertical marketing at Twitter and who held leadership roles at Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, Yahoo, and Tradeweave, founded Intellimize with Brian Webb and Jin Lim in 2016. While at Yahoo, he worked with both Lim, who was VP of engineering at Yahoo’s personalization platform group, and Webb, who held a senior principal architect role on Yahoo’s personalized content recommendation team.
Intellimize’s product taps AI to generate bespoke webpages for each unique visitor in real time, and to perform A/B testing on both desktop and mobile devices. It enables customers to optimize for one or multiple goals simultaneously, Yalif says, and it makes adjustments in response to user behaviors.
Yalif claims that in 2017 and 2018, Intellimize helped to test 177 different ideas and 78 million combinations of webpages. Furthermore, he says that clients like Drift, Stella & Dot, SoFi, Bills.com, Perkville, Huckberry, Talkdesk, Cocofloss, LaserAway, Tigerchef, and Sterling Talent Solutions experienced an average lift in conversions of 46% and that 88% of campaigns saw positive results.
According to one paying customer — Looker — optimizations suggested by Intellimize’s platform drove five times return on investment by nudging prospective customers to content, demo requests, and other web forms.
“We completed years of testing in just a few quarters, and then applied those insights across our marketing channels to better engage prospects with more targeted messaging,” said Looker CMO Jen Grant. “Intellimize’s AI provided my team with leverage and a great financial return while giving my team to focus on what matters most: the customer experience.”
Along with the fresh capital, which Yalif says will be used to accelerate development of its AI and expand the team “across all functions,” Intellimize announced the appointment of Salesforce, People.ai, Lattice, and Demandforce veteran David Singh as VP of sales. It also revealed that Amplify Partners general partner Mike Dauber will join the company’s board of directors.
Source: VentureBeat
