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Startup Deep Dive : Wingify — the bootstrapped VWO maker that sold control for $200 million

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Wingify.

Wingify turned down every venture capital cheque offered to it for fifteen years, then in January 2025 handed over roughly 80% of itself to a private equity firm for about $200 million in a single deal. The company that built its entire founder mythology on refusing outside money is, as of 2026, no longer majority owned by the man who built it.

Its flagship product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), now sits inside a business generating more than $100 million in annual revenue, merged with a French rival it used to out-market, AB Tasty, under one new global brand called simply Wingify. A two-person team from Delhi that once celebrated making $4,000 in its first paid month is, sixteen years later, part of a roll-up spanning eleven offices on four continents.

Quick facts

Company Wingify Software Private Limited (product: Visual Website Optimizer / VWO)
Founded 2009 (first prototype), relaunched as Visual Website Optimizer in 2010, New Delhi, India
Founder(s) Paras Chopra and Sparsh Gupta
Businesses VWO experimentation, personalization and analytics SaaS platform; merged with AB Tasty in 2026 under the unified “Wingify” brand
Latest FY revenue ₹386 crore (~$40.2 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) operating revenue in FY25, up 34% year-on-year (Entrackr, 17 November 2025)
Latest FY profit/loss ₹24 crore net profit (PAT) in FY25, down 61% year-on-year from ₹61 crore in FY24 (Entrackr, 17 November 2025)
Listed Private (unlisted); rated [ICRA]A- (Stable) by ICRA, 12 January 2026
Market value / last valuation Approximately $200 million majority-stake deal with Everstone Capital, reported January 2025 (TechCrunch; Entrackr)
Key shareholders Everstone Capital ~76.84%; Paras Chopra ~10.45%; Vyom Mankekar ~5.07%; Sparsh Gupta (CEO) ~4.86%, as per an April 2026 rights-issue filing (Entrackr, 6 April 2026)

What they do

Wingify sells Visual Website Optimizer, a digital experience optimization platform that lets marketing and product teams run A/B and multivariate tests, personalize web pages for different audience segments, record and analyse visitor sessions and heatmaps, and roll out feature changes without waiting on engineering queues. Customers are mid-market and enterprise companies running high-traffic websites and apps, historically cited by the company and press coverage as including Microsoft, Lenovo, Walt Disney, Target, eBay and Ubisoft, spread across more than 90 countries (TechCrunch, 23 January 2025). Since January 2026, VWO’s testing and personalization tools have been sold alongside AB Tasty’s personalization and feature-flagging stack under a single merged brand, also called Wingify (Wingify Blog, 16 September 2026).

The origin

Paras Chopra had been coding since he was fourteen and had already failed at a string of ventures during his engineering years at BITS Pilani — a personal-finance tool called NaramCheez, a stock-market product called Precimark, a classifieds site called MyJugaad.in, and a music-promotion startup for independent bands called Kroomsa (HandWiki biography; Inc42, republished via Medium). None of them found paying customers.

The insight that stuck came from a narrower, less glamorous problem. Marketers wanted to change website elements — a headline, a button colour, a checkout step — and measure which version converted better, but doing that meant filing a ticket and waiting for a developer. Chopra, while holding a full-time job and aiming only to clear $1,000 a month on the side, built a tool that let non-technical users make those changes visually, point-and-click, then split traffic between versions and measure the result. He first shipped it in 2009 as a broader marketing toolkit called Wingify; when that landed with barely a ripple, he and college senior Sparsh Gupta narrowed it to one job — visual A/B testing — and renamed it Visual Website Optimizer in 2010 (Wingify Blog, “Evolution of Wingify over the last 10 years”; YourStory, August 2020).

The struggle years

The first setback came before the company had a real name for what it did. The 2009 version of Wingify was pitched broadly, posted to Hacker News, and drew only around fifteen to twenty interested users — not the wave of adoption Chopra had hoped for (Wingify Blog, “Evolution of Wingify over the last 10 years”). It took the 2010 narrowing to pure A/B testing, described later, to change that trajectory.

The second, more damaging setback came years later and inside a supposedly successful company. Wingify’s second major product, PushCrew, sold web push notifications as a marketing channel and grew quickly through the mid-2010s. But it was priced above a wave of cheaper competitors entering the same category, and rather than compete on price the team tried to reposition PushCrew as a premium option — a story, in the founder’s own later telling, about quality rather than cost (The CMO Journal, Substack, “The stories that made Wingify”). It worked for a period, then the ground shifted entirely: through 2017 and 2018, web push notifications lost favour with consumers and browser makers as an intrusive channel, demand for the category collapsed, and Wingify has since acknowledged it did not tell a strong enough story to hold the business at its earlier highs (The CMO Journal, Substack). PushCrew never became the second pillar the company needed; VWO remained the business.

The turning point

The hinge moment was small and specific: the decision, in 2010, to stop building a general marketing product and ship a single-purpose visual A/B testing tool instead. Before it, the broad 2009 version of Wingify had attracted only fifteen to twenty interested users off a Hacker News post and no meaningful revenue. After it, the newly renamed Visual Website Optimizer launched paid plans and made $4,000 in its first month — four times Chopra’s original target of $1,000 a month (Wingify Blog, “Evolution of Wingify over the last 10 years”). That one narrowing decision, not a funding round or a marquee customer, is the event the rest of the company’s growth traces back to.

The money behind it

For most of its life, Wingify’s funding story was the absence of one. That changed abruptly in 2025 and 2026:

How it makes money

VWO is sold as recurring SaaS subscriptions, not on a transaction or take-rate basis. Pricing is tiered — published tiers include Starter, Growth, Pro and Enterprise — and scales chiefly with Monthly Tracked Users (MTU), the count of unique visitors who interact with an active test, personalization campaign or tracking setup in a given month, rather than raw page views (VWO’s own MTU pricing page; independent pricing breakdowns from Eppo and Personizely). Every tier above the entry level is sold through a “schedule a demo” sales-assisted motion rather than self-checkout, with a 30-day free trial as the only self-serve step.

The largest cost, and where the margin actually sits, is people. Employee benefit costs were 61.8% of total expenses in FY24 and rose to roughly 68% of total costs in FY25 (Entrackr, 12 November 2024 and 17 November 2025). The part outsiders tend to get wrong is assuming a fifteen-year-old, profitable, bootstrapped SaaS company is immune to margin shocks: in FY25, Wingify’s EBITDA margin fell from 27% in FY24 to just 3.68%, as employee benefit costs jumped 88% to ₹257 crore and legal and professional charges rose 26% to ₹48 crore — even as revenue grew 34% (Entrackr, 17 November 2025).

The numbers

Fiscal year Operating revenue (₹ crore) Net profit / PAT (₹ crore)
FY22 191 58
FY23 223 51
FY24 289 61
FY25 386 24

Where the money comes from

The risks

The takeaway

Bootstrapping proved that Wingify could build a real, profitable, globally sold product without giving up equity early — fifteen years of that discipline is exactly why Everstone was willing to pay roughly $200 million for control of it in 2025. But the same numbers that make the story satisfying also show how fast that discipline can be spent once a different kind of capital enters: the founder who turned down every venture cheque for over a decade held around 10% of his own company within about fifteen months of finally signing one, and the profit margin the company had defended for years fell by more than 23 percentage points in the same window it was absorbing a merger. The lesson for other bootstrapped founders eyeing a private equity exit is not that selling is wrong — it is that control and culture change faster than the press release suggests.

Frequently asked questions

What does Wingify do?

Wingify makes Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), a SaaS platform for A/B testing, personalization, heatmaps and session recording, and feature rollouts, sold to marketing and product teams at companies with high-traffic websites and apps (TechCrunch, 23 January 2025).

Is Wingify still owned by founder Paras Chopra?

No, not in majority. Everstone Capital held approximately 76.84% of Wingify as of an April 2026 rights-issue filing, with Chopra holding around 10.45%, having sold majority control in a roughly $200 million deal in January 2025 (Entrackr, 6 April 2026; TechCrunch, 23 January 2025).

What happened to Wingify in 2025 and 2026?

In January 2025, Everstone Capital bought a majority stake for about $200 million. In April 2026, the company raised a further ₹1,381 crore (about $150 million) via a rights issue. In January 2026, VWO agreed to merge with French rival AB Tasty into a single company generating over $100 million in annual revenue, unveiled under the shared brand name Wingify (Entrackr, January and April 2026; Wingify Blog, September 2026).

How does Wingify make money?

Through recurring SaaS subscriptions priced mainly by Monthly Tracked Users rather than by transaction or take-rate, sold across tiers from Starter to Enterprise via a sales-assisted, demo-led motion (VWO pricing page; Eppo and Personizely pricing analyses).

Is Wingify profitable?

Yes, though thinly so in its latest reported year. It posted a ₹24 crore net profit on ₹386 crore of revenue in FY25, down from ₹61 crore of profit in FY24, as employee and legal costs rose sharply (Entrackr, 17 November 2025).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

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