The business story
Paras Chopra is a self-taught programmer (and biotechnology graduate of DTU) who founded Wingify in 2009 and launched VWO (Visual Website Optimizer) in 2010 — an early visual A/B-testing / conversion-optimization tool. He built it bootstrapped and profitable to ~$50M revenue and 6,000+ clients across 90 countries, with no venture capital, before a 2025 private-equity sale to Everstone Capital (~$200M) in which he held ~71%. A prolific writer (Inverted Passion) and podcaster ("Bold Conjectures"), he stepped down as CEO years earlier and now runs Lossfunk, an unfunded AI research lab in Bengaluru.
Early life and background
Paras Chopra was born in Punjab and taught himself to program after getting access to a computer in eighth grade. He learned Visual Basic and, by ninth standard, was spending his spare hours building neural networks in it, years before machine learning became mainstream. When he chose a degree, he picked biotechnology at Delhi College of Engineering (now DTU), graduating in 2008. He already knew how to code; he wanted a different way of seeing the world.
Before starting his own company he built machine-learning models for employability testing at Aspiring Minds and spent time at a research firm.
Building Wingify and VWO
Chopra founded Wingify in 2009 and launched VWO, the Visual Website Optimizer, in 2010. The product let marketers set up A/B tests through a visual editor instead of asking engineers to code each page variant, which made it one of the early tools in conversion-rate optimisation. Sparsh Gupta co-founded the company and led engineering.
Wingify never took venture capital. Growth came from customer revenue, which forced careful spending and early proof that people would pay. By 2018 it had around $18 million in annual recurring revenue and about 6,000 clients in 90 countries; by the time of its sale it was generating roughly $50 million a year and was highly profitable. Around 2017 to 2018 Chopra handed the CEO role to Gupta and became chairman.
In January 2025 Everstone Capital acquired a majority stake at a valuation of about $200 million. Chopra held roughly 71 percent going in and kept a minority stake and a board seat.
