Episerver, the Nashua-based digital experience provider, announced the acquisition of Optimizely on 3rd September. Optimizely, headquartered in San Francisco, is one of the world’s leading firms in the experimentation platforms segment.
The latest acquisition aspires to deliver highly personalized and differentiated experience to their customers. Talking about the latest acquisition, Alex Atzberger, the CEO of Episerver stated, “for nearly three decades, Episerver has helped businesses create content-driven digital experiences for our customers. Today, we are announcing the most significant transformation in our company’s history – one that will set a new industry standard for digital experience platforms.”
Read More: Humana and Salesforce Joined Hands For A New Healthcare Platform
Talking about Optimizely, the startup found widespread fame with their A/B testing solutions. The startup then further developed other products to help marketers experiment and personalize their applications. The main talking point of the company’s platform is that it enables users to perform tests on server-side components supporting a service. Developers also use Optimizely for creating pilots for their updates or changes before the changes go live for the general audience.
Optimizely had raised over $200 million in funding, with the investors’ list containing notable names such as Goldman Sachs and Index Ventures. However, the recent struggles presented by COVID-19 created tough times for the startup as it was forced to lay off around 15 percent of its staff earlier in 2020.
Read More: How COVID-19 Impacted Cloud Tech Usage?
Jay Larson, the CEO of Optimizely, spoke about the acquisition and what the companies aim to achieve. The release on Optimizely’s website quotes Larson as “winning in today’s digital world requires delivering the best and most personalized digital experiences. Episerver and Optimizely have a shared vision to optimize every customer touchpoint through the use of experimentation. Together, we will enable our customers to do more testing, in more places, with greater ease than ever before. We believe this combination will make experimentation a mainstream business best practice and an essential part of competing and winning customers in an online world. With the combination of creation and optimization, we look forward to building a new community of digital experience leaders.”
The two companies aim to finalize the acquisition by the final quarter of 2020. Till the time the entire acquisition process is finalized, the two companies will operate as independently with clearly defined separate staff. As of now, there is no news on the value of this deal, but a spokesperson stated that the deal was a mix of cash and stock. A Bloomberg report also stated that the deal was valued at around $600 million, which is a reflection of Optimizely’s valuation as of June 2019. However, the two companies declined to make any comments on the deal’s valuation, and any estimate as of now remains unconfirmed.
Read More: Here’s How IBM is Ahead of Curve in Financial Services Cloud Arena