About ABsmartly

Behind every experiment is a team asking: Is this really the right move? ABsmartly began with that same question.

Our story starts in 2008, when our cofounder Jonas Alves joined Booking.com as a full-stack developer. While at Booking, he quietly began building what would become one of the most advanced experimentation platforms in the world.

Back then, A/B testing wasn’t cool. It wasn’t mainstream. It was manual, messy, and barely understood.

Jonas changed that.

Meet Jonas Alves

Currently Jonas leads product innovation efforts as ABsmartly's Chief Innovation Officer (CIO). Previously, he served as ABsmartly's CEO for five years.

Over the next seven years, Jonas introduced dynamic visualizations and helped define Customer Data Platform-like tracking (before CDPs were a thing). Eventually, through his efforts, experimentation became simple and fun for every product and marketing team at Booking.

At the time, Customer Data Platforms didn’t have a name. But the principle was already in motion: Jonas developed a way to track multiple user metrics across sessions with a single line of code. This gave teams a unified view of customer behavior. It made the platform more sophisticated, more scalable, and more experimenter-friendly. No complex instrumentation (or unwieldy spreadsheets) needed.

Under his guidance, Booking.com scaled to over 1,000 concurrent experiments. And it became a global leader in experimentation culture.

Jonas trained hundreds of new hires and embedded experimentation into the DNA of one of the internet’s most successful companies.

Though his success was rewarding, he saw a deeper need beyond Booking: Experimentation systems should adapt to businesses—not the other way around.

That’s where ABsmartly began.

Smarter testing begins with people who’ve been there.

Jonas teamed up with Márcio Martins, Bruno Silva, and Mário Silva—engineers and architects who had built experimentation tools for Booking.com, Tripaneer, and Preply. Together, they set out to create a platform that combines statistical depth, real-world usability, and the flexibility today’s teams need.

Along the way, Jonas, Márcio, Bruno, and Mário consulted with companies like Tinder, Adidas, GetYourGuide, OkCupid, and Coupang, helping these businesses build experimentation culture from the inside out.

And when it came time to double down on the stats engine?
They partnered with Georgi Georgiev, author of "Statistical Methods in Online A/B Testing" and creator of the AGILE Group Sequential Testing method. The result is a platform that marries AGILE Group Sequential Testing (GST) with real-world performance—trusted by teams across e-commerce, travel, banking, media, and more.

Meet Georgi Georgiev

Georgi is a strategic advisor for ABsmartly. He wrote the book, “Statistical Methods in Online A/B Testing,” and he founded Analytics-Toolkit.com. He does ABsmartly's stats.

Eventually, ABsmartly invited Lukas Vermeer, former Director of Experimentation at Booking.com, to join. Lukas advises on all things product and experimentation culture. His commercial awareness and statistical expertise helps businesses use data to make good decisions at scale.

As an experimentation industry thought leader, you can find Lukas's contributions to the field on his website. His observations on building and growing an experimentation culture are captured in the popular paper, “It Takes a Flywheel to Fly: Kickstarting and Growing the A/B testing Momentum at Scale.”

With the stats and product development covered, ABsmartly needed some excitement. To get that, they tapped Erin Weigel, former Principal Designer at Booking.com and author of the book, “Design for Impact: Your Guide to Designing Effective Product Experiments” to join the team in 2024.

Erin's love of and enthusiasm for experimentation is contagious. Not only does she advise on ABsmartly's design direction, she also spends time supporting ABsmartly clients. Her hands-on experimentation workshops and educational talks get teams experimenting confidently with ABsmartly fast.