TL;DR

• Raised $28 million led by Benchmark Capital with participation by Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, InterWest Partners, and Google Ventures.
• Annual revenue growth rate over 400% and revenue run rate in double digit millions.
• Expanding to 9 languages representing 36 countries.
• Signed 56,000 sq ft lease at a beautiful new San Francisco office with room to grow to 450 people.
• Big investment in making website personalization as easy and fun as we’ve made A/B testing.
• We’re just getting started.

Big Day

 While having a ton more money in the bank is great, our primary goal in this process was to find the best partner. This person would be the first person other than me and my co-founder, Pete Koomen, to serve on our board and this is a relationship we hope to cherish for a very long time as we mature in our roles as entrepreneurs. We are confident we’ve done that by choosing Peter Fenton from Benchmark to join our board.

Peter’s work spans a broad range of exemplary technology companies, from Yelp and Twitter on the consumer side, to New Relic and ZenDesk on the enterprise SaaS side. The thing that impressed me the most about Peter was that he focuses his time and energy on asking the right questions, not prescribing the “right” answers.

The new round also includes major investments from Bain Capital Ventures, along with current investors Battery Ventures, InterWest Partners, and Google Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $31 million.

A Record Breaking Year

We’re on pace to grow revenue faster than any other SaaS company in history. We launched in October 2010, reached cash-flow positive in October 2011, and our annual growth rate from March of 2012 to March 2013 is over 400%. Today our revenue run rate is in the double digit millions with no end in sight. Revenue has grown so fast that cash has never been a constraint on hiring. Instead we’ve focused on whether or not a candidate is the best possible person for the job. Having an additional $28 million in the bank will make this even easier to do.

A year ago we were a team of 13, having just moved into a new office here in downtown San Francisco. We imagined we had enough space to last us for a while – we were wrong. Today we are 68 and just signed a new lease for a 56,000 sq ft office that will fit at least 450 people. Interested in joining us? We have 25 different job reqs currently open.

In addition to our team growth we’ve also had tremendous customer growth. Our customer base has more than doubled in size, with over 4,000 businesses in 53 countries now using Optimizely.

Source: builtwith.com

Personalization, International Expansion, and The Road Ahead

Paul Graham wrote in his essay entitled, Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas, that “one of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we’ll seem backward to future generations.” We firmly believe that 10 years from now people will look back at today and be shocked at how generic, impersonal, and one-to-many what we call the web is. Businesses like Amazon, Google, and Facebook are all rooted in the idea that they can use the data they have about their visitors to deliver them a better experience. It is inevitable that the web will look more like Amazon, Google, and Facebook than it looks today. We are striving to become the layer on top of the web that powers that experience.

This funding will fuel our collective efforts to take our next big step – making website personalization as easy and fun as we’ve made A/B testing. Our vision is to enable businesses to show exactly the right thing to the right person at the right time. The first step toward that vision is our progressive delivery & AB testing tool. Right now, we’re working on product developments that will enable businesses to provide an incredible experience through targeting and personalization.

Additionally, we will be making big investments in our infrastructure and customer support so we can continue to scale our platform to keep up with our growth. Our customers have created more than 200,000 experiments to date and this number is growing fast.

We are also excited to continue investing in our international expansion.  We opened our first European office in Amsterdam late last year and we have plans this quarter to launch Optimizely in 9 languages, representing 36 countries.

Needless to say, we’ve got a lot to look forward to.