San Francisco based Optimizely may have been the pioneering A/B testing platform for website content, but the money it had raised didn’t quite reflect that. That is, until now.
Today, Optimizely announced that it raised $57 million in its Series B funding round, with the help of a few big name investors. The funding was led by one of Silicon Valley’s biggest VC’s, Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Bain Capital and Benchmark Capital.
This is a pretty big validation for Optimizely, which has long been one of the most popular platforms, especially out here in the valley, for testing website content. It introduced the concept of A/B testing, which allows marketers or web publishers to show different versions of content to different audiences to figure out what’s performing best.
Last year, it raised a relatively small $28 million in its Series A funding, but since then, it’s seen some pretty impressive growth. Co-founder and CEO Dan Siroker says it is now the number one most adopted platform for website testing, beating out some pretty heavy competition from Adobe’s Test and Target, Google’s Website Optimizer, Monetate and Optimost. Here’s a look at the growth of the top website content optimizing platforms:
Siroker’s claim to fame was as the head of analytics for the Obama campaign in 2008, and he built out the Optimizely platform based on the needs he identified during his time there. In 2012, both the Obama and Romney campaigns were using Optimizely, and it also landed a few big-name clients along the way, including Starbucks, MTV and The Walt Disney company.
