Webflow Acquires AI Specialist Intellimize

Webflow, valued at $4 billion, has acquired Intellimize, a company specializing in AI-driven webpage customization.

With a $4 billion value, Webflow, a platform for web creation and hosting, has funded over $330 million and is entering the marketing optimization space.

Webflow revealed today that it had purchased Intellimize, a business that uses AI to customize webpages for each individual visitor. The details of the agreement remained confidential. However, a media-reliable source with knowledge of the situation claims that the purchase price was at the “eight-figure” level.

About fifty employees, or the bulk of the Intellimize team, will join Webflow. However, Webflow did not disclose the number of employees who received severance pay or took advantage of outplacement packages.

According to Vlad Magdalin, CEO of Webflow, Intellimize’s solution addresses a need that many of Webflow’s clients have: personalizing and optimizing their websites. As such, Intellimize was an obvious choice for Webflow’s first acquisition.

“A lot of our partners and customers have been asking us to help them improve how well their websites are able to bring them new customers beyond the initial build phase,” Magdalin said. All our customer segments share the common goal of creating professional websites that not only look great but also drive business results. “It became very evident that combining the forces of our respective products and our teams could create a much more powerful combination,” the company said. “Intellimize quickly emerged as a really impressive product in this space, receiving raves from many growth and marketing leaders.”

In 2016, Guy Yalif—who had previously headed Twitter’s vertical marketing division—co-founded Intellimize alongside Jin Lim and Brian Webb. Yalif previously worked with Webb, an architect on Yahoo’s personalized content recommendation team, and Lim, Yahoo’s vice president of engineering at the time.

Using Intellimize, Yalif, Webb, and Lim set out to create a platform that could create customized webpages for visitors on demand, leveraging their collective expertise in marketing.

The reason for it? Statistics provided by Porch Group Media show that 74% of consumers become irritated when they can’t change the content on a website. Businesses that use personalization report higher sales, as well as more effective marketing expenditures.

Intellimize uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create pages that automatically adapt to users’ behavior and origins. Businesses design a template for a website, and then Intellimize’s AI explores, adjusting different dials and knobs, as it were, until it presents the best results to users. Note that Intellimize is not alone in this.

Amazon’s Personalize has the ability to generate customized products and online search suggestions. Firms such as Evolv AI and Optimizely, recently acquired by Episerver, utilize algorithms to automate specific types of A/B web testing. Not to mention platforms powered by generative AI, such as Adobe’s GenStudio, Movable Ink, Mutiny, and Blend, which are accelerating the development of brand-new forms of experience personalization.

However, Intellimize manages to carve out a sizable niche for itself in the market for AI-powered marketing, whether it is through partnerships, technology, or advertising.

At the time of the transaction, Intellimize had a number of marquee clients, including Sumo Logic, Dermalogica, and ZoomInfo. The company had received over $50 million from investors, including Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners, and Homebrew.

“The Intellimize team had an impressive roster of enterprise customers using their solution and had already built most of the personalization and optimization tools that we were considering building in-house,” Magdalin stated. “We think their team and product would be a very powerful addition to Webflow’s existing platform, as they demonstrated world-class expertise in machine learning and AI to power website personalization and conversion rate optimization.”

What changes may consumers of Intellimize anticipate now that the company is part of Webflow? Yalif emphasized that there are not many that cause trouble. Despite offering Intellimize separately to clients who are not Webflow users, it will gradually integrate and collaborate with Webflow services. Yalif will join Webflow as the “head of personalization,” overseeing the company’s efforts to develop personalized products.

“We can scale and greatly accelerate our forward momentum by joining Webflow,” Yalif stated. “Webflow is developing its all-inclusive solution for designing, developing, and optimizing websites. Intellimize serves as the foundation for that vision’s personalization and optimization components. When we band together, we can challenge the bigger, more costly, and more difficult-to-use competitors in the digital experience market.

This is Magdalin’s opinion:

By integrating Intellimize, we reach a wider audience than just engineers and designers. Later this year, the best of Webflow and the best of Intellimize should be available as a single, cohesive product experience, since we’re concentrating on natively integrating both of our products during the first phase of the merger.