The first Leanplum customer did not exist. He was an engineer, because Leanplum's founders were engineers, and founders have a touching habit of mistaking the mirror for the market. Momchil Kyurkchiev and Andrew First had left Google in 2012 to build a mobile A/B testing tool. At Techstars they interviewed the people they expected to buy it. The engineers were unmoved.
The useful version
- Leanplum let app teams test interfaces, personalize content and coordinate push, in-app, email and lifecycle campaigns.
- Its buyers were growth marketers and product managers who owned conversion and retention - not the engineers the founders first imagined.
- It raised roughly $125 million and was acquired by CleverTap in 2022 for an undisclosed sum.
- The method to copy: test the audience, isolate one behavior, keep a control and let an ugly result improve the next hypothesis.
The disappointment had good manners. It arrived early, before years of product work could turn a preference into doctrine. Product managers and marketers, the founders discovered, cared intensely about the thing their tool could change: business metrics. An experiment was not chiefly a technical object. It was a way to discover why a person installed an app, why she returned, and why she finally stopped.
“The result? We were dead wrong. Engineers weren’t remotely excited about what we had to offer.”Andrew First, co-founder
The product moved to the person who owned the number
Leanplum began with mobile A/B testing for iOS and Android. The proposition was unusually practical: alter an interface or piece of content, expose different groups to different versions, and measure what happened. In 2014, the company added marketing automation. Later came email, push notifications, in-app messages, an app inbox, audience segmentation and analytics. What had been a test bench became a control room.
That combination mattered. A marketing team could observe an event - a cart abandoned, a game level completed, a trial nearing its end - select an audience, send a message, vary the treatment and inspect the result. Leanplum's remotely configured variables also let teams swap certain app content without waiting for the next store release. The code still required developers; the daily decisions no longer had to queue behind them.
Tesco found the button that was too helpful
A Tesco case study supplies the cleanest picture of what the platform was for. The retailer's mobile product page was long, and its add-to-cart button could disappear far below the information shoppers were reading. The sensible fix was a persistent button at the bottom of the screen. Sensible designs are delightful right up to the moment they meet a customer.
The new button reduced items added to carts by 19 percent. Tesco suspected banner blindness: because the fixed button appeared immediately, shoppers may have treated it as scenery. So the team restored the original static button and added a second behavior. Only after a user began to scroll did the button lock into view. That hybrid increased additions by 3.3 percent over the original, and Tesco rolled it out to all iPhone users.
Where it sat in the crowded cloud
Leanplum sold enterprise SaaS on custom contracts; public list prices were not its habit. Growth, CRM and product teams at app-first companies were the audience. Public customer material named Tinder, Lyft, Grab, Zynga, TED, TextNow, MobilityWare, Pixelberry and Tesco. Gaming, subscriptions, mobility and retail fit especially well because users return often and leave a trail of useful events.
Braze, Iterable, Airship, MoEngage, OneSignal and Customer.io competed nearby. Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle waited with larger suites and larger procurement documents. Leanplum's distinction was the union of orchestration with the in-app experience: not merely sending a message about the product, but testing and changing the product around the message.
The historical Leanplum wedge
What teams can copy: begin with a behavior, not a channel. Decide what action matters, define a control, change one meaningful thing, and inspect the losers. The method depends on clean event data, enough traffic for a credible comparison, and the organizational patience to leave a test alone. It is a poor fit for tiny audiences, infrequent use, fuzzy success metrics or teams that treat every notification as free attention.
The arithmetic of “better together”
Funding followed the widening product: $4.8 million in 2014, $11.6 million in 2015, $29 million in 2016, $47 million in 2017, and a $27 million extension in 2020 among other capital. The company said it tripled revenue for three consecutive years through 2017. In 2020, George Garrick replaced Kyurkchiev as chief executive, while the co-founder moved into the chief product role. The explanation was familiar: inventing a company and scaling one ask for different reflexes.
CleverTap agreed to acquire Leanplum in May 2022. The price was not disclosed. The pitch was that Leanplum's personalization and A/B testing would complement CleverTap's analytics, segmentation and scale. Together, the companies said, they would serve more than 1,200 customers in over 100 countries. New Leanplum SDK releases began wrapping CleverTap's SDKs, allowing a customer-success team to guide migration rather than forcing an automatic switch.
Three years later, the merger looked less tidy. Mint reported product overlap, disappointing sales performance, leadership departures and layoffs affecting an estimated 60 to 70 Leanplum employees. CleverTap confirmed layoffs and the liquidation of Leanplum's Bulgarian entity, while saying customers and employees in other regions were unaffected. Kyurkchiev departed. A platform built to resolve competing variants had encountered the one experiment no dashboard can simplify: combining two companies.
The portable Leanplum lesson is not “send more.” It is “learn sooner.” The first bad result is often the cheapest useful thing a company owns.
Leanplum's public documentation and open-source SDKs remain available, and repositories continued to receive updates into 2026. The independent company is gone; pieces of its product and its way of thinking remain. That is an ordinary corporate ending with an unusually neat beginning. Two engineers asked engineers if they wanted the future. They said no. Leanplum had the sense to ask someone else.