Episerver Completes Acquisition of Optimizely, Creating the Industry’s Most Advanced Digital Experience Platform

NEW YORK, October 21, 2020 - Episerver, a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Optimizely, the leader in experimentation and optimization.

With Optimizely, Episerver is an industry powerhouse able to optimize every customer touchpoint across the entire user journey and strongly positioned to lead in the estimated $20B digital experience market. The combined company enables customers to do more testing, in more places, with greater ease than ever before. With the powerful combination of creation and optimization, companies can now experiment on every customer touchpoint, from product development and content to digital experience and customer support, along with their go-to-market strategy and related business logic.

“While every B2B and B2C company is online today, not every team is using customer insights to confidently seize new opportunities and adapt to challenges,” said Alex Atzberger, CEO of Episerver. “I’m thrilled that with the completion of our acquisition of Optimizely, we are democratizing experimentation so companies can replace guesswork with evidence-based outcomes that drive transformation, customer engagement and brand differentiation.”

Episerver’s expanded portfolio empowers digital teams to be more intentional in their customer engagements as well as more agile in adapting to changing behaviors and markets. The new Episerver delivers a unique system of differentiation to inspire product and experience innovation using real customer insights; increase agility to test and deliver impactful experiences and speed time to market; and improve outcomes through unique digital experiences for each customer, at scale.

Following today’s acquisition close, Episerver serves approximately 9,000 brands and more than 900 partners globally in segments including retail, manufacturing and distribution, financial services, insurance, health care, media, and technology, among others. As part of Episerver, the Optimizely progressive delivery and experimentation platform continues to support customers as a standalone solution, and will also be available as part of Episerver offerings starting immediately.

Industry Comments

“With its acquisition of Optimizely, as with its acquisitions of Idio and Insite in 2019, Episerver substantially increases the value proposition that the company offers to enterprise brands,” said Jacob Groshek, research manager, Digital Experience Management, at IDC. “The Optimizely acquisition adds AI-based experimentation and optimization to the Episerver portfolio. The purchase of Optimizely not only augments Episerver's capacity to automatically deliver personalized content as a central component of users' digital experiences, it also adds another layer of behavioral intelligence for organizations.”

Transaction Details

Episerver is a privately held portfolio company of Insight Partners, purchased in 2018 at $1.16B. Insight Partners acted as the strategic advisor and sponsor for Episerver’s acquisition of Optimizely, as well as the company’s 2019 acquisitions of B2B commerce leader Insite Software and analytics and personalization provider Idio. Now with Optimizely, Insight Partners further advances Episerver’s market-leading product. In the same manner, Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC served as exclusive financial advisor to Optimizely.