What Intellimize’s $8M Series A Says About the Future of Split Testing

Why Amplify Partners Believes Personalized Content Authored by AI Will Be The Next Wave of Digital Marketing Innovation

On April 23rd, Intellimize announced an $8M Series A round led by Amplify Partners. The San Mateo-based startup aims to use machine learning to optimize websites, thereby increasing revenue and customer acquisition for ecommerce businesses. Intellimize is planning to use the newly raised fund to advance the development of its AI and grow the team “across all functions.” Mike Dauber, the general partner of Amplify Partners, will join Intellimize’s board of directors, and David Singh, a veteran who had worked at Salesforce, People.ai, Lattice, and Demandforce, is appointed as the new VP of sales.

What were the VCs thinking?

Amplify Partners backs founders who are commercializing frontier technology. In this deal, they are placing a big bet on an emerging marketing strategy that dynamically personalizes a website’s content for each individual visitor using AI — which eases a major pain point for digital marketers seeking to optimize their campaigns.

This round reminds us of Amplify Partners’ recent $11M investment in Determined AI’s series A. The deep learning-focused startup offers a platform that makes creating, training and deploying new models much more efficient for ML engineers. Both ventures are eliminating the barriers to leveraging the potential of AI in commercial settings.

The Traction Behind the Deal

With its novel solution, Intellimize has successfully boosted the sales of its early customers. For instance, Jen Grant, the CMO of Looker, mentioned that adopting Intellimize’s platform has driven five times ROI by correctly directing its visitors to the content they needed to make a buying decision.

“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 in her interview with VentureBeat.

Intellimize’s CEO Guy Yalif points out the key opportunity for Intellimize’s tech in the marketing space: “Last year, marketers spent $100 billion in paid media to drive traffic to websites, yet 98% of those visitors left without becoming customers.” Lifting conversions at scale is a challenge that’s been impossible to tackle using traditional A/B split testing and one whose resolution would be a dream come true for CMOs frustrated by the drop-off between their pay-per-click ads and landing page conversions.

This article originally appeared on Foundational.

Kevin He is a dedicated economics and mathematics double major at Williams College passionate about investing, venture capital, and startups. He has interned in finance, operations, and strategy at PillPack (acquired by Amazon), and has worked as a market analyst for a boutique management consulting firm BusinessHub Consultants in Santiago, Chile.

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