Our Investment in OfferFit: The Essential Personalization Engine for Modern Marketers

Our Investment in OfferFit: The Essential Personalization Engine for Modern Marketers

by: Mike Ghaffary and Harrison Lieberfarb

We’re excited to announce that we’re leading a $14M Series A investment in OfferFit , with Mike joining the company’s board. OfferFit makes personalization software that helps organizations deliver the right marketing messages to the right customers at the right time.

OfferFit’s next chapter comes at a time when CMOs compete with CIOs with how much they are spending on software—$120 billion globally . This worldwide trend mirrors what Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff predicted about a decade ago, “CMOs are going to want their own cockpit...their own fighter jets, because honestly, CMOs are going to start spending much more than CIOs in technology.”?

Marketing is now a trillion-dollar global industry , and the marketing tech stack is jam-packed with infrastructure tools, APIs, and solutions that power how companies conduct global business and connect with diverse audiences online.

OfferFit has a special place in the martech stack: operating as a personalization engine located between data systems like a CDP and activation channels like email and SMS—a critical area previously occupied by human brains and patchworked solutions. Fortune 500 companies working in industries like ecommerce, media, home services, and telecoms already trust OfferFit to deliver personalized experiences that grab consumer attention, help close grand-scale deals, and take context into account for the best 1:1 marketing outcomes.?

We’re particularly excited about OfferFit because we think they’ve created a truly unique solution within the broader ecosystem. We’ve spent a long time surveying the martech landscape, and we’ve seen a lot of great products and tools. Over the course of countless hours spent speaking directly to founders and attending demos, we’ve never seen a product built to replace years of pricey consulting, implementation, and integration, while going steps deeper than optimization to deliver truly personalized messages to the right audiences. OfferFit does it all with a reasonable out-of-the-box price and immediate, quantifiable results for customers.

When I was doing business development at TrialPay (a martech startup acquired by Visa), I remember landing a big new partnership with a credit card issuer that I was really excited about. We had a user acquisition flow with emails and a landing page, and I was convinced we were going to create a lot of value with it. However, I was disappointed with the initial results, generating only a modest amount of revenue that wasn’t going to add up to much on an annual basis. This is when a lot of non-technical people previously might have had to scrap the partnership or launch of a new business line. Instead, I was lucky to be technical enough to work with the engineering team to mockup several new layout experiments, many of them counterintuitive to what our original gut was on how conversion worked.?

To my pleasant surprise, we were able to increase the annual revenue on the partnership by something like 8x (a 700% improvement). That was just with a simple process of multiple rounds of optimization and attempts at personalization I was able to come up with manually, working with our engineering team to implement. That was a long time ago, and even for the occasionally technical business person who might try something like this, it’s harder than ever to get through code review, security review, product planning cycles, etc, and get any resources to personalize an experience.

This is where OfferFit comes in. OfferFit can run circles around that 8x improvement I made through multiple rounds of human intervention by running countless experiments and permutations that would be too hard to manually manage. OfferFit also needs less human intervention and inspiration--it’s AI can just test everything for you.

As with all of our investments, the most important factor to drive our conviction was the team. I was first introduced to OfferFit by my friend Luther Lowe, an executive who I worked with at Yelp. Luther had known one of OfferFit’s co-founders, Victor Kostyuk , from growing up and thought Victor was the smartest student he had ever met. OfferFit’s founders, George Khachatryan and Victor Kostyuk, met when doing their PhDs in math at Cornell. They then both had amazing experience working with the Fortune 500 at McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group. It was instantly clear they had a keen understanding of the market value tied to delivering a product that eliminates the need for massive spend, lengthy timelines, and complex third party contracts. After our very first conversation, OfferFit’s global potential as a company and the practical gravity of their product’s offering was clear to us.

As we celebrate the announcement of the Series A, we trust that OfferFit’s insanely smart (and lean) team of founders and engineers will use the investment to make its product even more dynamic. We’re also excited to be joined by our co-investors including: Alumni Ventures Group, Burst Capital, Blacknova, plus a host of angels including Jeremy Stoppelman (Founder & CEO of Yelp), J. Frederic Kerrest (Executive Vice Chairman, COO, and Co-Founder of Okta), Samuel Adeyemo (Founder of Aurora Solar),? Alex Clayton (General Partner at Meritech), Kevin Stumpf (CTO of Tecton), and David Edelman (former Fortune 50 CMO, Aetna).?

OfferFit is democratizing multi-variant, multi-channel marketing personalization at scale. And as a board member, I am looking forward to working with fellow OfferFit board members, George, Victor, and the rest of the team to advance that important mission.