Everstone to merge Wingify with AB Tasty after buying out key investors

Everstone Capital is in the process of merging its portfolio company Wingify with French content optimisation company AB Tasty.

The mid-market Singapore-based private equity firm has invested a significant chunk of capital into buying out the captable of AB Tasty to bring the two entities together, Sparsh Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Wingify, a digital experience optimization startup, told Mint. “Majority of the investors from the AB Tasty side are being cleaned up,” he said.

AB Tasty’s backers include Credit Mutuel Equity, Korelya Capital, Omnes Capital, Partech Partners, XAnge. The French startup last raised capital in 2020 in a $40 million Series C round, bringing its total funding to $64 million.

It remains unclear which investors have sold their stake to Everstone Capital.

Gupta declined to comment on the specifics of the transaction, including which investors had exited the company, what the shareholding pattern will look like upon the close of the transaction.

The Wingify-AB Tasty merger is yet another sign of India's SaaS ecosystem maturing to the point that companies can be taken to the public markets. With Amagi on its way to list on the bourses and several others like Leadsquared, BusinessNext, Zenoti, Icertis, Mindtickle, Juspay and Whatfix considering the public markets, experts say that this year's tech initial public offerings are likely to be dominated by SaaS companies.

“The co-founders from AB Tasty and myself and our CTO Ankit Jain continue to be significant individual shareholders and remain deeply invested in the combined entity,” said Gupta.

AB Tasty co-founders Rémi Aubert and Alix de Sagazan have relinquished their board seats but will continue to have voting rights in the merged entity. They will take on the roles of chief customer and strategy officer and chief revenue officer, respectively. The board will now comprise primarily of independent directors from Everstone and Gupta.

The merger is the second such announcement to come out of the Everstone-backed company in a month. Notably, it's also been just over a year since Everstone acquired a majority stake in the bootstrapped SaaS company for $200 million in a deal that saw co-founder Paras Chopra exit the company.

In December last year, Wingify acquired a Y Combinator startup called Blitzllama, which specialises in artificial intelligence-based (AI) user research for an undisclosed sum. At the time of the Blitzllama acquisition, the company said its annual recurring revenue was approaching $60 million.

“The combined business will be considerably scaled up in the category we work in,” said Gupta. “Both businesses, standalone, are profitable. The combined entity will now have over $100 million in annual recurring revenue.”

Wingify’s operating revenue in FY25 stood at ₹386 crore compared to ₹288 in the year prior, but profit declined as employee expenses shot up. Total expenses stood at ₹376 crore in FY25, as opposed to ₹221 crore in the previous fiscal. Profit in FY25 stood at ₹24 crore, compared in ₹61 crore in FY24.

Business ahead

In a conversation with Mint earlier, Gupta said the company would turn to acquisitions to fuel growth. To be sure, there aren’t many companies operating in the website optimisation space. According to Tracxn, among Wingify’s competitors, AB Tasty ranks fourth, out of 561 companies globally.

The company has also begun chasing enterprise sales after having spent a bulk of its time targeting small and medium businesses. Gupta said the merger would help push that part of its business forward.

“It helps enterprise strategies because we’ll now have access to local talent, more local support and a broader platform. All those ingredients combined help us go for more enterprise deals.”

The combined company, once the transaction is completed, will give it more bandwidth to invest in AI, something Wingify had already begun implementing in its platform.

“We’ll now have access to a lot more data points, which allows our platform to have more depth and breath, giving us more context on users in a more nuanced manner, which in turn allows us to deliver more value,” said Gupta.