Optimizely Surges to $400M ARR, Pegs Growth on Demand for its Marketing Operations System

It's a glass-clinking, champagne-drinking moment by all accounts.

Optimizely, a leading digital experience platform (DXP), just announced that it has surpassed $400 million in annual recurring revenue after experiencing four consecutive quarters of double-digit growth. 

Not a bad haul for a company that started life as a CMS in 1994. Back then, it was called Episerver. 

The transformation is quite a tale, one that's been 30 years in the making. Episerver had a heck of a ride to the top, becoming an industry-leading content management system with a global presence. In 2018, following its acquisition by global software investor Insight Partners, the company embarked on a strategic journey to acquire category-leading companies and align its product offerings with the evolving requirements of modern digital teams.

Over the past three years, to complement its best-of-breed CMS and better address marketers' needs, the company integrated solutions for content marketing (Welcome), experimentation (Optimizely), and commerce (Insite Software). 

This new ecosystem of solutions led to a rebrand under the “Optimizely” banner, an appropriate name given the forthcoming focus on optimization as a digital imperative.

In 2023, its efforts resulted in a landmark achievement: the launch of Optimizely One. As the industry’s first operating system for marketers, Optimizely One offers a unified workflow – accelerated by AI – to simplify the process of creating, managing, delivering, and optimizing content seamlessly within a single platform. 

This breakthrough offering has led to a 21% year-over-year growth in multiproduct ARR. On top of that, an astounding 52% of Optimizely’s ARR is attributed to multi-product customers. This reflects the motion of brands as they consolidate their tech stacks into one unified suite to improve (or optimize) the total cost of ownership and reduce martech complexity.

“Reaching $400 million in annual recurring revenue is a remarkable accomplishment that proves we are successful in our mission to make marketers’ lives better,” said Alex Atzberger, CEO at Optimizely. “We are immensely grateful to our employees and partners, who have worked tirelessly to deliver the world’s first operating system for marketers. Optimizely has always been at the forefront of delivering exceptional digital experiences – starting with our CMS thirty years ago – and we are excited to continue leading the industry for the next thirty years and beyond." 

Building value by the numbers

Optimizely's composable solutions are trusted by thousands of companies globally, all with the mission of making marketers' lives better. Over 10,000 businesses deliver their digital experiences with Optimizely, and their increased reliance on the platform further cements its value to marketers.

From a performance perspective, Optimizely has put up some impressive numbers. For example: over 70,000 experiments have been completed in the last 12 months – an 18.5% YoY increase – resulting in 390 billion test impressions. 

Customers have also seen a 24.6% increase in experiment ideas submitted, signaling the rise of collaborative test-and-learn cultures. Additionally, almost 150 customers have gone live on Optimizely's CMS since the beginning of 2023. That's over a 20% increase YoY, and an impressive testament to growing preference in a noisy market with expansive choices. 

Optimizely has also seen gains with its Content Marketing Platform. Over the last year, usage of its CMP has nearly doubled, with 890,000 tasks and activities completed. This validates that marketers are seeking solutions that support the entire content and campaign lifecycle.

One more remarkable data point: Optimizely’s market-leading commerce solutions – available in both SaaS and PaaS – enabled its B2B and B2C customers to complete over 50 million transactions last year.

Leading with industry analysts

Optimizely's ARR milestone aligns with several key analyst reports published since the launch of Optimizely One, all of which position them at the top of the market. The company is now recognized as a Leader in nine different analyst reports across each of its content, experimentation, and commerce offerings.

These include the recent Forrester Wave: Commerce Solutions for B2B, Q2 2024 and Gartner's 2024 Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms, where it has been named a Leader the seventh consecutive year – positioned highest for its “Ability to Execute." Optimizely also maintained its Leader position in Gartner's 2024 Magic Quadrant for DXPs for the fifth consecutive year.

Optimizely works with more than 40% of Top 100 Interbrand companies, acting as the operating system for marketing – and the go-to choice for companies like Zoom, Shell, and American Express to drive digital transformation and business growth. This is a contributing factor to its unprecedented ARR achievement. 

"With three decades of experience investing in high-growth SaaS companies, Insight Partners knows what success and healthy growth metrics look like in software. Optimizely's growth trajectory has been extremely impressive and reflects their enduring commitment to innovation and customer empowerment," said Adam Berger, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Not only is achieving this ARR milestone a difficult feat, but the company also has all of the components needed to sustain its strong market position. We're proud to remain a core part of Optimizely’s journey and are excited to see them achieve new milestones along the way.”

Why it matters

With such a trailblazing heritage in content management and digital experience, Optimizely has long been a bellwether for where the CMS and DXP markets are headed. Its industry surface area has evolved to include categories like CMP, but Optimizely's core value always comes back to content – and this is a company that's been shaping the content trajectory since 1994.

While Adobe has maintained dominance in some of the relevant analyst channels (like DXP), Optimizely has been closing the gap against Goliath. With the introduction of its Optimizely One solution, it has clearly leveled up and driven demand with customers seeking a more complete solution – the kind that offers composable products that answer their challenges with greater flexibility, choice, and value. That strategy is resulting in significant market and revenue gains.

Optimizely has also focused on the marketer as a key audience, starting with its purchase of Welcome in 2021. The added content marketing and digital asset management capabilities have expanded its appeal beyond the more focused lane of CMS while integrating everything within a composable solution. This continues to deliver a competitive edge as brands shift to delivering omnichannel experiences and look to market across a myriad of ecosystems like social media. 

Just like its name suggests, optimization is central to Optimizely's brand promise. As more companies look to enhance performance through testing and experimentation, Optimizely is already ahead with robust tools and AI features to help teams realize their personalization goals and access meaningful data and analytics from their programs.

Optimizely's pace of innovation is clearly aggressive, and needs to be in a tight competitive market where uncertainty is always looming. The addition of new features across its portfolio – including AI – may very well lengthen its lead as customers look for greater scale and automation from their content tools. And with more capital to drive innovation, it can continue to meet and exceed customer expectations in an ever-changing digital world. 

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