Apptimize Brings Mobile A/B Testing to Non-developers with $2.1M in Seed Funding

San Francisco, CA – Apptimize, the Y Combinator startup offering a much needed A/B testing platform for mobile applications, has raised $2.1M in seed funding.  The funding has enabled Apptimize to develop the Visual Apptimizer, a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface that empowers even non-developers to A/B test their apps.  A-list investors, such as Google Ventures’ MG Siegler and Rich Miner, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, and Quora cofounder Charlie Cheever, invested due to the huge, unmet need for a simple, rigorous tool for app optimization.

The traditional method of optimizing apps is to develop one version, release it to users, wait for (often anecdotal) feedback, develop a second version, release it to users, and hope that the second version performs better than the first.  This usually takes months to accomplish and an inferior second version can often cause a huge financial setback for the app developer.  Apptimize’s A/B testing platform allows app creators to produce multiple versions of an app, release them to the public simultaneously, and get statically proven results without waiting for additional Apple Store approvals.  Not only does this cut months off the development cycle, it also brings analytical rigor to app optimization.

The Visual Apptimizer takes the game to another level by enabling non-developers to implement many of the tests themselves.  Product managers, producers, and designers often have to wait their turn on a developer’s long queue of tasks in order to improve their app.  With the Visual Apptimizer, a developer only needs to implement a few lines of code in the app to set things up, and the product manager can test different versions of the app without additional coding.  The results are measured by Apptimize’s analytics algorithms, and the insight is generated on an easy to use dashboard.

“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,” said investor, MG Siegler, Google Ventures.

About Apptimize:

Apptimize was conceived in Silicon Valley when Nancy and Jeremy were debating the primitive state of app development. Why must people resort to home-grown A/B testing solutions that crash their apps and are extremely hard to use or understand? Why can’t native app optimization be as easy, fast, and risk­free as website optimization? Modern websites wouldn’t exist without web optimization concepts, so how cool would apps be if app optimization was mature too?

Nancy and Jeremy realized a new technology was needed for app development and testing. Apptimize envisions a world where every app is personalized and optimized for each user, and this is the first step toward that future.

About the founders:

Nancy Hua, CEO

Nancy led the GETCO (now KCG Holdings) Fixed Income Quantitative Strategies team in New York and Chicago. She is a world-class expert in algorithmic trading and electronic exchanges.

Jeremy Orlow, CTO

Jeremy loves new technologies and has years of experience in both mobile and web engineering, having worked as the iOS lead on mobile security at 3LM and owning IndexedDB within Chrome.