All the latest martech and adtech news this week from SAP, TransUnion, Lytics, RollWorks, Sendinblue, UPshow, AcuityAds and Tableau
Sendinblue raises US$160 million for digital marketing platform
All-in-one digital marketing platform, Sendinblue, has raised US$160 million in a Series B funding, a milestone it's claiming as a first for an all-in-one marketing platform.
The latest round includes support from Bridgepoint, Bpifrance and BlackRock, with Partech reinvesting from the previous US$35 million in Series A funding round in 2017. The investment will be used to drive product expansion to further support small and medium-sized businesses and accelerate growth in the North American market.
Sendinblue was founded in 2012 and offers what it pitches is an all-in-one digital marketing solutions include email, SMS, marketing automation, sales management and live chat. As well as organic development, the company has built out the platform via acquisitions, including that of MailClark and Newsletter2Go.
Since 2018, Sendinblue has experienced 100 per cent year-over-year growth in the US, the fastest-growing market for the company, and now serves more than 180,000 customers across the world with 400 employees globally.
“In the wake of the pandemic, small and medium-sized businesses have been forced to be nimble to grow and even to survive,” said Sendinblue founder and CEO, Armand Thiberge. “As a result, there’s been a stronger demand for tools that allow businesses to reach their customers more quickly and effectively. At Sendinblue, it’s not business as usual. We know it’s survival of the fittest and the most agile. Our products help that happen.”
TransUnion to acquire Tru Optik
TransUnion has entered into an agreement to acquire Tru Optik, which builds on recent investments in identity and consumer insights for marketing.
Tru Optik is a data marketplace and data management platform for connected TV, streaming audio and gaming. Its patented household graph of more than 80 million US homes enables household-level identity, targeting and measurement across connected TV, smart speakers, gaming consoles and other connected devices. The companies said Tru Optik and TransUnion’s complementary capabilities will provide TransUnion’s expanded customer base with the reach, accuracy and transparency missing in current identity and audience development products.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. This is Transunion's third acquisition in the last 18 months, and comes off the back of its purchase of data marketing management vendor, Signal, in August and martech platform, TruSignal, in May 2019.
“Connected TV has quickly become most consumers’ preferred way to access long form video content. With the standard digital identity signals being sunset, marketers and media companies are looking toward a new generation of identity and audience products to reach the right people and households,” said TransUnion EVP marketing solutions and media vertical, Matt Spiegel.
“Tru Optik has been at the forefront of innovation in this area. Their data marketplace is integrated with the leading buy- and sell-side platforms and is available now for streaming TV and audio campaigns. By bringing our two companies together, our combined assets will result in an expanded suite of solutions that modern marketing requires.”
SAP to purchase Emarsys
SAP has entered into an agreement to acquire Emarsys, a leading omnichannel customer engagement platform provider.
The deal is aimed at helping brand deliver hyperpersonalised, omnichannel engagements in real time, ensuring every engagement is relevant and impactful. Emarsys enables businesses to engage more personally with customers and the new partnership should enhance the SAP customer experience portfolio.
Read the full CMO story on the deal here.
Tableau integrates with Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics
Tableau is integrating with Einstein Analytics, creating a new analytics platform to be renamed as Tableau CRM, and bringing together a set of product integrations that will provide a more seamless experience for joint customers.
The first integration is Einstein Discovery in Tableau, AI-powered analytics that enable business users to automatically discover relevant patterns based on their data – without building sophisticated data models or engaging teams of data scientists. Planned for the first part of 2021, Einstein Discovery in Tableau enables real-time predictive modeling and recommendations capabilities across the Tableau platform.
Future alignment plans include connecting Tableau natively to the Einstein Analytics data store to enable performance optimisations and native Salesforce security integration. Data preparation capabilities that read and write to both Tableau and Einstein Analytics, helping ensure clean and trusted data, ready for analysis, is available to everyone. And content portability between Tableau and Einstein Analytics to streamline creation of dashboards and make it easier for everyone to access it.
Salesforce acquired Tableau for a whopping US$15.7 billion in June 2019.
Lytics releases Predictive Audiences
Lytics, the insight-first customer data platform, has released Lytics Predictive Audiences, a tool that builds lookalike models allowing marketers to reach out to their customers with timely, personalised experiences delivered at key stages of their lifecycle.
The vendor said marketers without data science expertise can build lookalike models on their own, inside Lytics rather than in a third-party marketing platform like Facebook or Google Ads, to reach out to customers and prospects with personalised experiences across media buying, email, social media and website experiences.
Lytics Predictive Audiences combines data with Lytics’ artificial intelligence (AI) engine, enabling marketers to build audiences using a dashboard that lets them control key variables, see results, understand key customer attributes, and troubleshoot issues.
RollWorks announces new partner ecosystem
RollWorks, a division of NextRoll, has taken the wrappers off the new RollWorks technology partner ecosystem and added partnerships with Folloze, LeanData, Opensense and PFL to its growing roster of technology partner market leaders.
The integrations across printing and direct mail engagement, email signature engagement and data segmentation add additional solutions for B2B marketers and sales teams with account-based strategies, and show continued momentum for the company following recent Web personalisation partnerships powered by a new RollWorks Site Visitor API.
For example, Folloze offers personalisation and sales orchestration to customer journeys across ABM, demand generation and virtual events, while LeanDate allows users to automate their go-to-market operations and manage routing flows. Opensense offers ABM efforts across omnichannel campaigns combining display ads with targeted email signature ad banners, and PRL aims to help marketers automate personalised direct mail in response to engagement with content.
AcuityAds launches new ad platform illumin
AcuityAds has launched a new advertising automation platform, illumin, which enables planning, buying and omnichannel intelligence in a single platform for more seamless visualisation and management of the consumer journey.
illumin allows advertisers to map the consumer journey across screens and execute in real-time using programmatic technology. illumin is the first standalone brand to grow from within the AcuityAds ecosystem following over US$100 million invested in the brand’s technology offerings.
The platform aims to offer a simple, intuitive user experience for marketing teams of all sizes and experience for viewing and management consumer journeys. Core features include a 'meet the journey canvas' for customer journey mapping and management, consumer scoring functionality and visualisation tools for media mix management and optimisation.
UPshow closes US$14 million Series A round
In other funding news, UPshow, a specialist in interactive digital signage, has announced a US$14 million Series A funding round.
The round was led by 4490 Ventures, with participation from Jump Capital, TDF Ventures and the Signature Venture Banking Group. In addition to the institutional capital investments, UPshow has the backing of strategic angel investors including former Publicis Groupe chief strategist and chief growth officer, Rishad Tobaccowala, and former comScore CEO Gian Fulgoni.
The company said it plans to use the funding for product development and to better service customers across the US as well as further afield.
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