Amplitude Acquires ClearBrain to Add Predictions to Analytics

ClearBrain’s patent-pending, machine learning technology will help our customers make big product bets faster.

Inside Amplitude
March 9, 2020
Image of Shadi Rostami
Shadi Rostami
Senior/executive VP of Engineering
Amplitude Acquires ClearBrain to Add Predictions to Analytics

At Amplitude, we work with leading digital teams who know that in today’s competitive marketplace, the best product experience wins. Our customers use our product intelligence platform to iterate quickly on big bets, and to stay ahead, they will need a platform that can instantly predict which features and campaigns are most likely to cause growth and make faster product bets without extensive A/B testing—they need predictive analytics with causal insights. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that Amplitude has acquired ClearBrain, the premier innovator in the predictive analytics space.

At Amplitude, we believe that empowering customers with product intelligence will lead to them building better products. When we first met with ClearBrain founders Bilal Mahmood and Eric Pollmann, we immediately connected on a shared vision of how analytics platforms could better serve customers. As the first SRE on Google Ads and lead of Optimizely’s data science team, Eric and Bilal respectively experienced the pain points of legacy analytics solutions, particularly time-intensive A/B testing in order to differentiate between causation and correlation in their data.

Pictured from left to right: ClearBrain founders Eric Pollmann and Bilal Mahmood with Amplitude Founder and CEO Spenser Skates and Senior/Executive VP of Engineering Shadi Rostami

ClearBrain founders with Amplitude CEO and Senior/Executive VP of Engineering

These experiences inspired Bilal and Eric to build a machine learning platform that could simulate thousands of those A/B tests in parallel. What they’ve created is years ahead of the market. Their self-serve, machine learning platform provides predictive insights with clear causation out of the box. Integrating this patent-pending technology into Amplitude will enable our customers to forecast any product action and differentiate causal versus correlated conversion drivers in seconds.

About Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics uses machine learning to look forward and forecast business outcomes or user behaviors.

Our philosophy at Amplitude is to provide self-serve insights. After meeting with Bilal and Eric, it was clear they felt the same. That’s why ClearBrain’s pioneering take on predictive analytics was to enable predicting any outcome in seconds as well as explain what causes those outcomes to occur. This required the development of a patent-pending machine learning system that could automatically create predictive models without any custom code, as well as advancements in a new type of predictive model known as observational causal inference.

Just the Beginning of an Amazing 2020 for Amplitude

ClearBrain joining us adds to an already strong start to 2020. So far this year, we’ve

  • added over 2.5 trillion new user actions to our proprietary behavioral database, Nova, from thousands of products around the world.
  • landed a global Fortune 100 financial service business as a key customer
  • released over 12 new features and improvements to the Amplitude platform including: a bi-directional integration with Intercom, a data ingestion tool for Adobe Marketing Cloud customers, automated analysis of the behaviors that drive conversion and drop-off, and enhanced privacy controls for customers.

See our February and January release notes for more details.

ClearBrain Joining Amplitude FAQ

When will ClearBrain’s technology be fully integrated into Amplitude?

We are beginning the integration process immediately, and we estimate most of the work will be shipped by Amplify 2020, our annual conference in the fall.

What is happening to ClearBrain’s customers?

Amplitude will continue to support ClearBrain’s paying customers until the technology is integrated, at which point we will work with them on transitioning to Amplitude’s platform.

Additionally, Amplitude will give ClearBrain customers on its free plan until the end of April to migrate to Amplitude’s platform. A majority of the behavioral analytics features available on ClearBrain’s free plan are already available on Amplitude, plus some (custom datasets up to 2,000 unique event types, custom dashboards, and unlimited data retention to name a few).

How will this affect Amplitude’s customers?

Once ClearBrain’s technology is integrated into Amplitude’s platform, our customers will be able to take advantage of the most advanced causal inference and predictive analytics technology in the market. In combination with Amplitude’s industry leading product intelligence platform, customers will be able to instantly predict the causal effect of any product feature or campaign to ensure they are making the right investments to drive growth.

About the Author
Image of Shadi Rostami
Shadi Rostami
Senior/executive VP of Engineering
Shadi is the Senior/Executive VP of Engineering at Amplitude. She is a passionate, seasoned technology leader and architect experienced in building and managing highly proficient engineering teams. Prior to Amplitude, she was VP of Engineering at Palo Alto Networks. She has innovated and delivered several product lines and services specializing in Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, Big Data, Machine learning and Security. She has a Ph.D. in computer engineering from University of British Columbia and a B.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology. Shadi has published several peer reviewed conference articles and journals as well as several patents.
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