India's Wingify and France's ABTasty Join Forces

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Wingify-ABTasty acquisition

Introduction

The Everstone-Wingify-ABTasty merger isn't a typical PE rollup - it's a calculated consolidation play in a market that's been quietly fragmenting for years. Everstone paid $200 million for Wingify's controlling stake last year. Now it's folding in ABTasty to build a $100 million ARR digital experience platform. Two former rivals, one cap table, and a bet that enterprises are done stitching together point solutions.

On the surface: a private equity firm doing what private equity firms do - combine, cut, optimize. But look closer, and the logic gets sharper.

Wingify and ABTasty weren't struggling. They were stuck. Both built solid A/B testing businesses serving overlapping customer bases across different geographies. Wingify dominated in value-conscious markets. ABTasty held ground in Europe. Neither had the scale to compete with the Optimizelys and Adobe Targets of the world - or the runway to build AI capabilities fast enough.

The founders—Sparsh Gupta and Ankit Jain at Wingify, Rémi Aubert and Alix de Sagazan at ABTasty—had spent over a decade in conversion optimization. They understood the space. They'd watched enterprises consolidate vendor relationships. They knew standalone A/B testing was becoming a feature, not a company.

And here's the strategic efficiency: instead of competing for the same 4,000 customers, they're combining to serve them—with Everstone writing the check to clean up ABTasty's cap table and fund what comes next.

History

Wingify didn't start as part of a $100 million revenue platform backed by private equity. It started as a bootstrapped experiment by a developer in Delhi who wanted to make A/B testing accessible to people who couldn't afford Optimizely.

Paras Chopra founded Wingify in 2010 with a simple premise: website optimization shouldn't require a six-figure contract and an implementation team. He built VWO—Visual Website Optimizer—as a self-serve tool that let marketers run experiments without touching code. No enterprise sales motion. No complex integrations. Just a product that worked.

The timing was perfect. Companies were waking up to conversion rate optimization. Google had made Website Optimizer free, validating the category. But most tools were either too basic or too expensive. Wingify found the gap.

By 2012, VWO had thousands of paying customers. By 2014, it had expanded into heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys—building a full-stack experimentation platform while competitors stayed narrow. The company remained bootstrapped for over a decade, generating tens of millions in revenue without touching venture capital.

ABTasty followed a parallel trajectory in France. Rémi Aubert and Alix de Sagazan launched in 2013, targeting European enterprises with a similar vision: democratize experimentation. They raised modest venture rounds—$17 million total—and built a loyal customer base across retail, travel, and financial services.

Both companies watched the same market dynamics unfold: Adobe acquired Omniture. Google killed its free optimizer. Optimizely raised hundreds of millions then struggled with enterprise complexity. The category consolidated at the top while mid-market players fought for scraps.

Then Everstone arrived. The PE firm took a controlling stake in Wingify for $200 million in early 2024. Twelve months later, it's merging the two rivals into a single entity—same category, combined customers, unified roadmap.

Deal breakdown

Here's what makes the structure interesting: Everstone isn't disclosing the price, but the math tells a story. $200 million for Wingify's controlling stake last year. Significant additional capital to "clean up" ABTasty's cap table now. A combined entity generating $100 million in annual revenue with 4,000 customers globally.

The timeline tells the story.

Early 2025: Everstone acquires controlling stake in Wingify for $200 million.

Late 2025: Merger discussions begin with ABTasty.

January 2026: Deal announced. Sparsh Gupta named CEO of combined entity.

But here's what Everstone actually built.

The product: Two overlapping A/B testing and personalization platforms serving mid-market and enterprise customers. Strong tech, loyal users, zero platform lock-in. Adobe and Optimizely own the high end. Google owns free.

The geography: 90% of revenue from the U.S. and Europe. Teams across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. ABTasty's European footprint plus Wingify's cost-efficient India operations.

The real play: Consolidation economics. Two companies spending money competing for the same customers now operate as one. Everstone cleans up ABTasty's messy cap table—likely bought out investors at a discount—and funds the AI roadmap enterprises are demanding.

What changes: Leadership from both companies stays. Gupta runs the show. ABTasty's founders take C-suite roles. "Customer experience unchanged in the near term"—PE speak for integration comes later.

The deeper signal: Standalone A/B testing is a shrinking category. Everstone's betting that combined scale plus AI investment creates something defensible. The alternative was two mid-sized players slowly losing ground to platforms that bundle experimentation for free.

Value proposition

To understand why Everstone merged two competitors, you need to understand what Wingify and ABTasty actually solved. Not another analytics dashboard. Not incremental marketing improvements. A fundamentally different approach to the problem that matters most in digital commerce: the gap between traffic and conversion.

The experimentation architecture did one thing obsessively well - eliminate the guesswork between visitor behavior and business outcomes. While enterprise platforms excelled at serving Fortune 500 companies with dedicated optimization teams, Wingify and ABTasty were designed specifically for companies lacking data science resources: the mid-market environments that determine whether experimentation feels like infrastructure or an obstacle.

Here's the product advantage: enterprise tools are gatekeepers. They require implementation teams, demand six-figure contracts, optimize for complexity - everything that slows adoption. Wingify and ABTasty are enablers. Self-serve interfaces, visual editors, built exclusively for marketers where speed matters more than statistical perfection. No developer dependencies, no month-long implementations, no consulting fees. Just experimentation for the exact customer segment Adobe ignored.

The real-world difference wasn't subtle. VWO delivered A/B tests within hours, personalization without engineering tickets, heatmaps without data warehouse integrations—not enterprise products requiring IT oversight. For growth teams where velocity defines success—product launches, campaign optimization, conversion improvements—these tools became default infrastructure.

And this mattered more as marketing budgets shifted from acquisition to optimization. Paid media costs rise annually. Conversion improvements compound permanently. Wingify and ABTasty owned the layer where companies actually improve ROI.

The customer momentum validated the approach. From bootstrapped startups to enterprise clients across retail, travel, and financial services - companies that could afford any experimentation partner but chose mid-market tools. Not because of aggressive sales or legacy relationships. Because when you give marketing teams infrastructure that moves at campaign speed, they migrate immediately. Speed is a feature growth leaders notice on day one.

Everstone saw all of this. The product differentiation, the overlapping customer bases, the market positioning in a consolidating category. These companies weren't building toward IPO. They were building toward combination.

What it means for founders

The Everstone merger exposes a brutal truth about martech startups: category leadership without platform control is a consolidation target, not a defensible position.

Most founders are fighting over features - better visual editors, faster page load, slicker dashboards. It's the most obvious place to compete, which makes it the most expensive. You're racing against Adobe's next acquisition, fighting on integration depth against platforms that bundle experimentation for free, and praying your standalone tool stays relevant for twelve months.

Wingify and ABTasty went one level higher: the mid-market layer. Self-serve experimentation, personalization workflows, and customer data platforms on top of infrastructure they didn't own. They didn't create better analytics engines. They packaged existing JavaScript libraries and third-party integrations into products that felt like modern optimization, not enterprise complexity.

That positioning made them acquirable, not defensible. Everstone couldn't see either company as a long-term standalone winner because both depended on website infrastructure controlled by CDNs, tag managers, and platforms with experimentation ambitions. They sat above the hard technical work, capturing customers without controlling distribution. That's why private equity moved—before the category compressed further.

Now Sparsh Gupta leads the combined entity, reporting into Everstone's portfolio structure. The same PE firm optimizing for EBITDA margins and eventual exit multiples. Gupta built a company that shipped fast by staying bootstrapped and founder-led. He's walking into a structure where integration synergies matter more than product velocity.

The $100 million revenue platform sounds like validation. It's actually a warning. These companies merged because they saw the ceiling coming. Adobe bundles Target into Experience Cloud, Google offers free experiments in Analytics, Optimizely pivots to content management—and suddenly your "standalone A/B testing" is table stakes inside every marketing suite.

Closing thoughts

The Wingify-ABTasty story isn't about disruption. It's about recognizing when standalone categories compress—and consolidating before the market prices you as a feature.

Over a decade of bootstrapped growth, $200 million PE investment, and now a merger with a former rival. Not because they built inferior technology, hired weaker talent, or lost product-market fit. Because they packaged existing optimization techniques into products that felt accessible—and combined before A/B testing became bundled into every marketing platform.

Everyone's obsessed with building moats. Wingify and ABTasty built distribution. They connected JavaScript snippets and visual editors to customers who wanted experimentation that moves fast, not enterprise complexity that gatekeeps. That positioning made them valuable to exactly one buyer: whoever needed mid-market scale and geographic coverage without building from scratch.

Everstone wrote the check.

Here's what founders should take from this: consolidation beats compression. The martech layer isn't defensible long-term, but it is combinable—if you merge before platforms commoditize your core feature. Wingify and ABTasty saw Adobe bundling experimentation, Google offering free tools, Optimizely pivoting away. They knew the standalone window was closing.

Everstone gets a $100 million ARR platform with 4,000 customers and room for margin expansion. The founders get C-suite roles, equity in a larger entity, and resources to build AI capabilities they couldn't fund alone.

That's not failure. That's what happens when you build something valuable enough to combine, competitive enough to compress, and consolidate before the math gets worse.

The best outcomes aren't always exits. Sometimes they're mergers that buy you another act.

Here is my interview with Udi Ledergor, the Chief Evangelist at Gong, where he spent nine years helping build the company from zero to a multi-billion-dollar valuation. A five-time B2B marketing leader, bestselling author of Courageous Marketing, angel investor, and board member

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