Customer experience platform Optimizely bought by Episerver

Digital marketing software company Episerver has announced it is to acquire digital experience startup Optimizely.

With the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerating the trend towards online business, customer experience is becoming an increasingly important differentiator between companies.

Optimizely describes its offering as being digital experience optimisation, allowing companies to experiment with and test different versions of its user-facing websites against one another to refine and improve them. Its customers include the likes of Visa, the BBC, IBM and the Wall Street Journal.

Episerver gave its rationale for the acquisition as being to create a holistic digital experience platform that could optimise the entire user journey. Supporting that claim, the company said its capabilities following the deal would include better experimental capabilities, tools to measure the outcomes of different options to tailor digital experiences to specific customers, and real-time answers to questions about the user experience.

In a press release, Alex Atzberger, CEO of Episerver, said: "The breakthrough combination of Episerver and Optimizely will transform digital experience creation and optimization, enabling digital teams to replace guesswork with evidence-based outcomes. This, along with our shared mission to empower growing companies to compete digitally, makes me thrilled to welcome the Optimizely team to Episerver, as we prove there are no extraordinary experiences without experimentation."

Optimizely has attracted significant backing since its foundation in 2009, with over $200mn raised across nine funding rounds. Its latest Series D round came in June 2019 from lead investor Goldman Sachs alongside Accenture Ventures.

In a press release at the time, Jay Larson, CEO of Optimizely, said: “As more business is done online, companies understand that optimizing the digital experiences they deliver to their customers is the difference between winning and losing in their respective markets. Building experimentation into your company culture requires the best platform and the best services.”