If you haven't heard by now, Everstone Capital (owners of Wingify and best known for VWO), has bought a controlling stake in AB Tasty, effectively meaning VWO is merging with AB Tasty.
So what do we know, and what does it mean for the digital optimisation industry?
Valuation
This was an interesting one to sleuth into as there are so many numbers. $500m value. $100m ARR. $200m investment in VWO at ~80% ownership. Here's what I've landed on.
Everstone bought ~80% of VWO for $200m in January 2025. They have now bought a controlling stake in AB Tasty. The amount is undisclosed.
Working backwards:
- "The merged business has more than 100M in ARR" and $500m valuation.
- VWO's ~$50m ARR was valued at about $250m, implied by paying $200m for 80%.
- VWO is likely to have grown somewhat since the purchase.
- AB Tasty's potential $50m ARR (guess, not known for sure) would need to make it the same(ish) valuation as VWO for the resultant entity to be worth $500m.
Some of this money was also said to clear up AB Tasty's cap table. In principle, "cleaning up the cap table" quite often means removing minor shareholders. However, to have raised $64M and be transacting c.$50m suggests either being very liquid or burning through the cash.
What does Everstone want?
I don't know but can speculate as follows. There are two plays I see occur often.
1. Buy up a segment of the market, consolidate it, and flip the product
VWO have been a lower/mid-end experimentation platform. AB Tasty is a mid/enterprise platform. For the most part, they have competed in the same space as Webtrends Optimize, Monetate and a couple of other platforms. Competition is tough, and fewer competing vendors could make winning customers easier.
Add to that consolidation of things like offices, infrastructure, people, and there are plenty of ways to run a bigger ship more efficiently, even if nothing else were to change on the product side.
With that said, the product is consolidating, and we can estimate timelines based on what we've seen from the rest of the world - 2 years minimum.
2. Build something that Salesforce/SAP/etc might want to buy
There are large platforms like Salesforce, SAP, Adobe etc who are lacking on the website-activation layer. Salesforce Commerce Cloud for example exists and could do with a stronger website layer. A lot of these work for narrow use-cases, but are far from the mass-market testing platforms like VWO, AB Tasty or ourselves at Webtrends Optimize. Adobe Target comes the closest, and ... we all know what Adobe Target is like.
In that world, AB Tasty + VWO isn't the end-game; it's a foundation.
AB Tasty is already pulling a bunch of technologies together - Wandz.ai for intent signals, Potions for Recommendations/ Merchandising, Dotaki which I believe formed their "Emotions AI" etc. Interestingly, these are all features that AB Tasty seems to lead with in their proposition today.
They fill each other’s gaps in this sense, with Session Recording/Heatmaps coming from VWO, and the AI/ML pieces coming from AB Tasty.
It wouldn't be surprising to see any other relevant tech fold into this, and then the final unified platform be sold to one of the uber-big platforms.
What does this mean for Webtrends Optimize and the wider industry?
I was very happy to see VWO get sold the first time, as with Statsig's $100M series C and other movement in our space.
First and foremost, it feels like the world still values what we do and wants to try and build something special. And that's great news for Webtrends Optimize too.
As a competitive product to the aforementioned, disruption has always been a good thing for us. Whether it's Maxymiser, Monetate, or these changes, acquisition and disruption usually means platform progress stalls in favour of integrations and large structural changes. And where we're moving very fast, we get time to create a functional gap.
Next, fewer fish in the same pond means less competition. It's easy to believe that AB Tasty is a core driver of VWO's push into Enterprise. That change moves two of our most frequent competitors out of the field. There is still very much a place in the world for a reasonably priced experimentation platform, with a solid WYSIWYG, good reporting etc. The world hasn't moved on from this need and if anything, it's grown.
Do I need to run away from AB Tasty and VWO today?
Realistically, no. Integrations take time, and I don't see anything indicating that the platforms are disappearing overnight. But there are some important things to pay attention to.
Looking at Rémi Aubert's announcement post and this phrasing really jumped out at me: "VWO excels with product-led growth". PLG includes good onboarding, support, self-serviceable features etc, but also very importantly includes gated features that people need to pay more to get access to. Something that Webtrends Optimize has always differentiated itself on, being all-inclusive for all users, no matter what size or shape your business is.
A study I ran last year showed over a dozen types of packages you can purchase from VWO, just from what was listed on the website. It's enormously complicated. If the resultant product from the merger goes deeper into this territory, customers are likely to become more frustrated, not less.
It has always made sense to evaluate Webtrends Optimize when your renewal comes along against VWO and AB Tasty, and my feeling is that while this isn't a "the ship is sinking" moment (far from it), the natural consequence of M&A activity in the SaaS world means the medium-term future isn't going to be as big and innovative as it could be if they were still working independently.
