All the latest martech and adtech news this week from Marketo, Meltwater, Radius, BigCommerce and more
Marketo announces collaboration with Google Cloud, and acquires Bizible
Marketo has extended its Google alliance and made the largest acquisition in its history this week.
The marketing automation announced it working with Google Cloud to create new products to empower marketers based on artificial intelligence (AI). Leveraging Google Cloud's machine learning technology, Marketo is working with the company’s experts to create new offerings focused on improving the speed, scale and effectiveness of campaigns by enabling marketers to better personalise and segment their audiences.
The work is the next stage in the multi-year alliance formed between the two companies last year.
In addition, Marketo has acquired Bizible, a provider of marketing performance management software. It’s the largest acquisition in the company's history and will see the two companies combining their complementary technologies and analytics to allow organisations to link revenue back to marketing investment.
Bizible's three co-founders, Bird, Andy Turman and Peter Thompson, along with the Bizible team, will join the Marketo team continuing to work out of the Bizible office in Seattle, which will become a satellite for Marketo. Financial terms were not disclosed.
“Together, our solutions create an industry-first platform for marketers to plan, engage, and measure by understanding what directly fuels ROI," said Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas. "The combined product strength of Marketo and Bizible provides all marketers everywhere enhanced visibility into every touchpoint across any channel. Our investment will accelerate Bizible's impressive growth and provide instant and achievable benefits to our current and future customers in the enterprise and beyond.”
Snooper raises $1 million
Snooper has announced a fresh $1 million investment led by Microequities Venture Capital Fund to further accelerate growth in Australia.
Using the Snooper platform, brands and retailers can connect with their shoppers around the country by uploading paid ‘missions’ to collect in-store data. These shoppers share their findings and experiences in real time via the Snooper App.
Snooper is pitched as helping brands and retailers monitor sales and marketing strategies in-store, and in real time, while creating a new gig economy platform for consumers eager to make some extra cash from their smartphone.
NICE to acquire Mattersight
Big data management software vendor, NICE, has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Mattersight, a provider of cloud-based analytics for customer service organisations.
Using interaction analytics, Mattersight aims to gain a deep understanding of both customers and agents, and acts on these insights in real time to connect consumers with the organisation in a personalised manner.
The integration of NICE analytics, powered by Nexidia and Mattersight’s behavioural analytics technology and domain expertise, is about bolstering NICE’s position in the cloud customer service management space. Financial terms were not disclosed.
“Analytics is the cornerstone of NICE's strategy of creating a new customer service paradigm with CXone and Adaptive WFO,” NICE CEO, Barak Eilam, said.
“We were very impressed with Mattersight's innovative technology and domain expertise, as well as its longstanding strategic relationships with some of the largest customer service organisations. This acquisition reaffirms our commitment to delivering analytics in the cloud and to be at the forefront of the analytics market."
BigCommerce closes oversubscribed $US60+ million funding round
BigCommerce has closed US$64 million in growth equity funding, led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from current investors General Catalyst, GGV Capital and Tenaya Capital. The new funding brings BigCommerce’s fund raising to US$200 million to date.
Founded by two Australians 2009 and now headquartered in the US, BigCommerce has grown to become a SaaS ecommerce platform serving Internet Retailer Top 1000 brands including Avery Dennison, Ben & Jerry’s, Gibson, Paul Mitchell, Sharp, Skullcandy and Sony. BigCommerce claims merchants selling on the BigCommerce platform have processed more than US$17 billion in sales.
The funding will be used to accelerate the product roadmap, fuel growth initiatives and drive international expansion. It follows new and expanded strategic partnerships with commerce and technology platforms such as Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Square and PayPal.
Meltwater acquires Sysomos
Meltwater has purchased Sysomos, a provider of social analytics and engagement, in a deal aimed at enabling organisations to analyse social media, news and other human-generated content in one platform.
“All the social analytics companies look at social data in isolation, limiting the insights for brands and businesses,” says Jorn Lyseggen, founder and CEO of Meltwater. “With our acquisition of Sysomos, we can bring together news and social media under one company, giving social data context while adding social engagement to our news and media monitoring offering.”
For the PR and communications teams who engage with influencers over social media, Meltwater’s existing media intelligence division will offer integrated news monitoring and social engagement. Under Meltwater, Sysomos will become the Social Analytics division with a focus on delivering insights to brands and marketing teams.
Sysomos is Meltwater’s seventh acquisition in 18 months. Following the acquisition of DataSift last month, it’s designed to pitch Meltwater as the market leader of both social analytics and media intelligence.
Radius and Leadspace join forces
Radius and Leadspace are joining forces under the Radius brand.
With more than 200 customers, including American Express, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, and MetLife, Radius aims to be a leader in data intelligence and help B2B brands find and reach buyers globally. As part of the realignment, Leadspace CEO, Doug Bewsher, becomes CEO, and Radius founder, Darian Shirazi, becomes executive chairman.
Leadspace said its customers will gain access to Radius’ network of record and digital ad channels, while Radius customers benefit from greater AI on global decision makers and upgraded data management capabilities. This new platform aims to solve fragmentation in the growing marketing technology landscape.
TripleLift and White Ops partner to fight fraud
TripleLift announced a partnership with White Ops to become what it claims is the first native exchange to offer third-party verified pre-bid fraud prevention across its entire inventory.
Leveraging White Ops’ pre-bid prevention product, MediaGuard, TripleLift aims to prevent fraudulent traffic across its platform, ultimately providing TripleLift clients with cleaner inventory.
TripleLift is bringing IVT prevention to the forefront of its services and adopting stricter guidelines that align with growing buyer demands for 3P measurement standards. As a result, TripleLift is now providing pre-bid fraud prevention in a bid to maintain a clean marketplace for buyers. Publishers will only be paid for validated traffic sold to buying partners.
Optimizely launches Feature Management
Optimizely has rolled out Feature Management, which aims to help product development teams test, iterate, roll out and customise features, is now available in Optimizely Full Stack.
With Feature Management, Optimizely Full Stack now aims to provide a complete platform for rolling out and experimenting on new and revised features. With feature management and experimentation coupled, product development teams can drive impact while reducing risk.
Optimizely provides a testing platform to control experimentation-driven product development lifecycle, from idea to feature flag, experiment to rollout.
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