Vev’s Time Has Come: Interactive Content Builder Acquires TIME Sites, Adds Marc Benioff to its Cap Table

When I recently spoke to Vev’s CEO, Tine Karlsen, she was at home – surrounded by a cacophony of cardboard boxes. 

“We’re renovating our bathroom,” she said lightly. “What you're seeing are glass walls and stuff.”

Bathroom renovations can be arduous. Don’t get me started on the plumbing. But that kind of pipework might be cake in comparison to what she’s building in her professional “house.”

Since 2017, when she co-founded Vev with partner Nicolay Thafvelin, Tine has been on a mission to enable creative teams to explore new perspectives and collaborate freely. 

Vev's Tine Karlesen and Nicolay Thafvelin. Source: Cision

To realize that vision, she and her cohorts imagined a collaborative visual editor – one that empowers developers, designers, and content creators to build and launch interactive websites and digital content. That was the birth of Vev. 

Over the last two years, we’ve seen a lot of what I call “visual editor exuberance,” spurred by the gap in headless CMS experiences. These tools helped “stitch” together the missing piece for marketers, giving them back more control over the visual layer with previews and drag-and-drop, no-code page builders.

Since then, many headless CMSes have bolted in their own editors and builders, providing a more complete fabric for users. Even Optimizely introduced a visual builder with its new SaaS CMS. That said, many of these builders within content management systems lack breadth and robustness, making it challenging to create uniquely immersive experiences in the CMS.

“We basically saw the emergence of all of these no-code tools that were, in many ways, trying to replace the CMS,” she said. “They built visual editors, but we saw the opportunity to build a solution that could integrate with any existing CMS. We started with interactive content in mind, especially storytelling and 'scrollytelling,' because we saw that was really difficult to solve in a CMS.” 

What makes Vev different is its focus on interactive content. The company has embraced its niche by helping organizations elevate the value of their digital marketing through more dynamic experiences, bolstered by tight implementation with the tech stacks of other content creation tools. The sites being built and launched on Vev are, in a word, beautiful. 

"We started with interactive content in mind, especially storytelling and ‘scrollytelling,’ because we saw that was really difficult to solve in a CMS.” 

As Tine explained, this particular focus came from a heritage of media-centric customers seeking more immersive ways to communicate online.

“They wanted to produce that interactive storytelling, but also content marketing and native advertising and that sort of thing,” she said. “We've always had a goal to create a solution that can build frontend on top of CMSes, but in a visual way.”

It all seems to be paying off. To date, the company has secured $7 million in seed funding to grow its idea into something bigger. Over the last three years, it has grown beyond its Nordic home base, scoring marquee customers like Pfizer, Experian, and the World Wildlife Fund (to name a few). 

Now, Vev is really vibing. Today, the company announced that it has purchased rival TIME Sites, an easy-to-use software platform for building websites. As Tine described it, the acquisition also “feels” like a merger, combining the strengths of both companies while establishing a beachhead for growing Vev into the larger addressable U.S. market.

The deal elevates Vev to a more potent global position. As Tine relayed, the company is primed to scale and is keenly focused on the enterprise. From a footprint perspective, they’ve expanded their workforce to 33 employees in 6 countries, servicing 700 customers around the world. 

Following the acquisition, SITES’ Kristina Valkanoff will join Vev as Country Manager for the U.S., focusing on expansion and growth in the market and collaborating with the broader team.

Setting Vev’s sights on SITES (with Benioff to boot)

While the financial details weren’t disclosed, it sounds like a solid move that aligns with Vev’s market focus. But there’s something else that makes this an even bigger deal, and it has to do with the heritage associated with the TIME brand. 

TIME Sites (now known simply as SITES) fell under the TIME media umbrella, which includes the storied and ubiquitous TIME Magazine. The technology was acquired through the purchase of a company called Brandcast three years ago, which was TIME’s first acquisition since Marc and Lynne Benioff bought the publication in 2018. 

Now, as a result of this lineage, Benioff – known not only for his success at Salesforce, but a slew of other acquisitions that include Slack, MuleSoft, Tableau, and other “marketshakers” – has become a shareholder in Vev.

SITES was designed to transform how business teams interact with customers at every stage of their journey. It’s built with simplicity in mind, enabling everyday business users – from sales and marketing to customer success and professional services – to quickly and easily turn content into dynamic, personalized customer experiences. These capabilities will be brought into the Vev fold, adding to their already extensive toolkit for global customers.

Source: TIME Sites website

Like Vev, SITES has been acutely focused on easy-to-use building features as part of its proposition. It offers some interesting facets, including sales and campaign-focused asset creation for customer proposal and demo sites, microsites, client portals, and more.

These content engagement tools have helped SITES establish a unique identity in the marketplace. In fact, Forrester Research cited the platform as an emerging technology in its Interactive Content Studio Functionality Segment – which covers next-generation content engagement solutions. The product also serves recognizable brands like Clorox, Colliers, and Kaiser Permanente.

I asked Tine what this acquisition really represents from a value perspective.

“It's meaningful because we were competitors in the market, especially when it comes to interactive content,” she explained. “We are definitely differentiated from them because we implement so closely with the tech stacks of other content creation tools.” 

As Tine detailed, this is a key advantage. Vev integrates so closely with the tech stack of other tools that you actually host your content in the same place as you host your core website. That has benefits when it comes to speed, security, compliance, SEO, and other factors that have both local and global considerations. 

On the topic of geographies, the acquisition also widens the portal to the U.S. market, where TIME Sites is based and currently services many customers. 

“We were looking for an efficient go-to-market model for the U.S.,” Tine said. “Even though we operate from Norway, 60% of our customers are U.S.-based. Because we're in the enterprise segment, we were thinking about how to actually scale.”

This might not be a shortcut, but it certainly accelerates Vev’s presence at a time when confusion and fragmentation are rampant in the CMS and DX market space. As Tine noted, the combination will provide a stronger foothold but also multiply innovation and product development.

Designed for interactive content – and more

At its core, Vev enables companies to create powerful interactive content and websites. This goes beyond the typical page-based experiences to unleash more creative and compelling editorials that employ popular techniques like scrollytelling, parallax, horizontal scrolls, and more – all out-of-the-box. 

Source: Vev website

On the surface, Vev’s visual UI is a home run. It’s sleek, ultra-modern, and highly intuitive. Like its page-building peers (think Webflow), the interface is an homage to the desktop publishing tools that legacy designers still crave, like Adobe Photoshop – and just as easy to navigate. The preview canvas is readily accessible, and the functionality is easy to register against the gunmetal graphite template, which evokes a coolness that can’t be denied. 

There’s a lot of flexibility in Vev’s toolset, enabling you to create entire websites or embeddable content blocks to enhance an existing site. You can get really advanced with the dynamic components, using granular no-code tools to compose and customize your visual layouts. You can also add interactions like animation from within the toolset. No third-party components to wrangle – you can create in one place. 

Vev also provides a rich tapestry for building e-commerce storefronts that showcase products in more beautiful and even esoteric ways. While Shopify has popularized the easy building of digital commerce sites, they often lack the luster and elegance that draw customers into the visual experience. This is where Vev can bring frontend differentiation to the store shelf.

Source: Vev website

One thing I really like is Vev’s simple data visualization tools. This feels like an overlooked component in some visual builders, but they’ve crafted a slick solution that allows you to turn raw data into captivating visuals and interactive charts – all without complicated coding. 

Source: Vev website

Complementing the control layer of the CMS

As Tine previously noted, Vev isn’t trying to replace any CMS. Rather, it’s complementing its content repository and publishing features and expanding on its core capabilities – effectively pushing its value boundaries. To that end, Vev is designed to work seamlessly with a number of CMSes, including Optimizely, Contentful, Craft CMS, Magnolia, WordPress, Drupal, Sanity, Netlify CMS, and more.

“We've tried to take a very agnostic position, because out of the box, Vev actually solves the limitations,” Tine said. “This is especially true with CMSes going headless, where the backend is simplified but the frontend isn't really simplified. We also knew that would always be miles ahead when it comes to the creative freedom of what you can build in Vev versus any of the block-based builders that CMSs are introducing.”

Being purely focused on frontend interactivity – and the workflow between the designer, the developer, and the marketer – has been a key focus for Vev. They clearly understand their lane, and have no goals to create backend functionality where the CMSs are in control. Also, as Tine indicated, the broader CMS market would be a costly and competitive pool to swim in.

“What we’re focusing on is changing the workflow for creating the frontend components and templates – making that visual rather than developer-led.”

An AI roadmap focused on productivity

It’s impossible not to ask about artificial intelligence, especially at a time when agentic AI is all the rage. While other no-code builders have embraced AI to generate everything from content to entire pages and sites, Vev has focused on the control plane for marketers – making sure they’re faster, more efficient, and fully in control of the experience.

To that end, Vev features a number of AI-powered tools within its platform that are tacitly focused on productivity. This includes built-in translations for streamlining localized content across different languages and geographies.

Compared to its peers, who have aggressively bolted on Gen AI capabilities at a breakneck pace, Vev has been biding its time. Tine believes their patience is paying off, as their existing features are making an impact right now. What comes next will be built on carefully watching what worked – and didn’t work – in the broader market.

“I have this high faith in ‘second movers’ when it comes to technology,” she stated. “We were sort of second movers, not the first to introduce no-code design. But our approach enabled us to explore the market, see the development in CMSes, see that no-code tools like Webflow and Framer might struggle with breaking through in the enterprise segment because of the way they built and approached the market. I see the same with AI now.”

This “second mover” mentality is most evident in the realm of AI-generated website tools. While players like Squarespace and Wix have bet big on this “magical” promise of automation, professional designers and marketers require visual building and editing to control the experience – particularly at the enterprise level. 

“Our efforts to complement existing tech stacks with visual editing capabilities are miles ahead,” Tine said. “We've invested years and years in those capabilities. We've held back on launching AI features because we wanted to use AI to boost productivity, but not replace human creativity. We will definitely launch more AI features that will either get you started or help you with best practices and that sort of thing. But then you always want to be able to quickly sprinkle it with creativity, instead of sitting there and prompting everything.”

Digging a little deeper into the enterprise as a target market, Tine said that Vev is working through multiple channels to deliver. Some of the motion is reliant on specialized partners, but the sweet spot seems to be direct enterprise interaction.

“We have solution partners that can help with implementation, and the level of implementation is up to the end customer,” she said. “You also have customers who are working to replace their frontend components with components built in Vev, which is a bigger lift and requires more technical expertise. But then you have Vev as a content builder, where you build blocks and pages that you insert in your CMS. We do both, but we typically work with the enterprise directly because Vev also gives them that opportunity to digitize a lot of things that they were dependent on agencies for.”

The Verdict

The market is flush with visual building tools, both within and outside CMS and DXP platforms. That means creators have a lot of choice – and the pantheon of products will continue to cater to their preference for control over the visual experience. The winners will be the tools that understand their place in the workflow and play nicely with the rest of the tech stack. 

While Vev might seem like another tricked-out builder, it’s following a very clear path to its audience. Websites are still the most important digital channel for the vast majority of brands, and the web experience is paramount. Giving designers more freedom to explore the limits of immersive storytelling is still essential – especially in an age when AI agents are calling more of the shots around design infrastructure and SEO is withering on the vine.

From a composable perspective, Vev offers both support and flexibility for developers. Its documentation provides specifics on how its frontend editor can connect with any CMS, and its content API is straightforward. More advanced enterprise content-building applications might require a solutions partner or professional services. If you’re more technically inclined and want to inspect the components for things like Sanity data table support, you can check out their Git repo here.

Is the TIME Sites acquisition a smart move for Vev? It’s hard to say based on the technology alone. From a strategic standpoint, they’re eliminating a competitor and expanding their entry into the lucrative U.S. market, all in one swoop. But that’s only part of the story: Associating with the TIME brand and Marc Benioff will certainly translate into added visibility, and perhaps even greater proximity to the Silicon Valley Circle. 

It's definitely worth noting that this marriage of website-building platforms has the rare distinction of bringing two successful female CEOs into the spotlight. Jessica Sibley, TIME’s CEO, has been Tine’s counterpart through the deal. 

“Vev shares our passion for digital storytelling and a proven commitment to innovation and growth,” she said, “making them the ideal home for TIME Sites customers.” Not a bad testimonial. 

I asked Tine about her perspective as a female CEO at a milestone moment like this, and how she views her mantle as a leader and role model.

“I'm from a family where my mother is a high-ranking officer in the Norwegian armed forces,” she shared. “I think it’s important to just be visible. Young women look to role models to envision what they can do with their lives. As a female founder, if I'm able to build a successful company and someone sees that, maybe they feel they can do the same.”

2025 is already proving to be a challenging year on many fronts. Technology vendors that are focused on delivering value have the best shot at thriving – and it looks like Vev has a lot to vibe about. They have a proven track record, a growing footprint, and some great brands in their portfolio. 

If you’re evaluating front-end visual building/editing tools and value design freedom and flexibility, it might be “time” to put Vev in your sights. 

Looking for guidance on Vev? Talk to an expert.

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