Y Combinator-incubated Apptimize is launching a new “Visual Apptimizer” that’s aimed at making A/B testing for mobile apps faster and easier — in fact, co-founder and CEO Nancy Hua suggested that it should make this kind of testing accessible to non-developers.
The company is also announcing that it has raised $2.1 million in seed funding from a number of big-name investors.
Apptimize launched last summer, pitching itself as an A/B testing platform (i.e., a system for testing out user response to variations of different features) that’s tailored to mobile. By inserting a small snippet of code, developers should be able to include multiple experiments in an app update that can be enabled and disabled at will.
As the name suggests, the Visual Apptimizer allows customers to make live changes using a visual, WYSIWYG editor without doing any coding. It won’t replace Apptimize’s other tools, Hua told me, but it allows a product manager or someone else who’s not particularly technical to test out small changes like revising the text or tweaking the placement of a button. You can see the editor in action in the video at the end of this post.
As for the funding, Hua said the biggest investors were Merus Capital, Google Ventures, Oliver Jung, and Tom Moss’s AngelList Syndicate. Taking the lead from the Google Ventures was TechCrunch alum MG Siegler, and Hua sent me the following statement from MG:
When we first heard the pitch for Apptimize, it sounded like something extremely useful that obviously needed to exist. But when we actually saw the product in action it seemed like a no-brainer that every single app developer should be using this service. A/B testing has been so vital to the web, and it should be even more vital to mobile. And you shouldn’t have to be the largest app in the world, Facebook, to have access to such powers.
Apparently, Apptimize raised the funding right after Y Combinator Demo Day in August but chose not to announce it until now. Indeed, Hua said they’d considered not announcing it at all, something she attributed to her “secretive” inclinations cultivated during her past experience in algorithmic trading.
Anyway, here’s the full (long) list of investors:
YCombinator S2013
Andreessen Horowitz
Start Fund
Maverick
GCINNOVATION
Ken Ross
Dana Marotto
Google Ventures
Hart Lambur
Ting Yin Kwan
Waseem Daher
Jeff Arnold
Tim Abbott
Oliver Jung
Farzad Nazem and Noosheen Hashemi
Arram Sabeti
Jotter Investment
Raj Fernando
Merus Capital
Beenos Partners
XG Ventures
Steven Fan
Starling Ventures
Charles Cheever
Andrew Valiente
Wayne Pan
DDBK PARTNERS
Albert Sheu
AngelList Fund (Tom Moss Syndicate) Fund
Chung-Man Tam
Hua added that the larger vision for the company is to become a “full-service platform” for developers: “We want to be the only thing that you need to integrate with your app.”
via TechCrunch » Startups http://ift.tt/1dPj1hF
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