CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 1 April 2021

All the latest martech, customer and adtech news from 6sense, Acquia, Neustar, Tableau, Impact, Outbrain, Blippar and ActionIQ

6sense raises US$125 million

Account-based marketing (ABM) vendor, 6sense, has raised US$125 million, bringing its total company valuation to $2.1 billion.

The latest Series D funding round was lead by D1 Capital Partners, with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Tiger Global and Insight Partners. It comes off the back of 100 per cent year-on-year revenue growth and 15 months after 6sense secured $40m in Series C funding.

The investment has been earmarked for supporting growth initiatives and accelerating the vendor’s product roadmap, including advancements around the data layer, developing machine learning-based next-best-action predictions, and customer journey orchestration tools. 6sense describes its platform AI and big data architecture as providing the ability to unify data silos and create a single system of insights and orchestration capabilities for account-based marketing.

“Customer conversations are a critical part of our due diligence process, and the feedback from 6sense customers is among the best we’ve heard,” said D1 Capital Partners founder and chief investment officer, Dan Sundheim. “Improving revenue results is a goal for every business, but it’s easier said than done. The way 6sense consistently creates value for customers made it clear that they deliver a unique, must-have solution for B2B revenue teams.”

Acquia updates Open Digital Experience Platform

Acquia has announced updates to the Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP) designed to help marketers and developers architect the composable enterprise.

These updates include the launch of Acquia Experience Platform, including Acquia CMS, the industry’s first agile enterprise content management system (CMS) built on Drupal. In addition, major enhancements to Acquia Drupal Cloud and Acquia Marketing Cloud, which together comprise Acquia Open DXP, promise to make digital experiences faster, more data-driven and easier to build.

Neustar launches Unified Identity

Information services and technology company, Neustar, which specialises in identity resolution, has launched Neustar Unified Identity.

The end-to-end identity management solution aims to enable resolution of offline to online identifiers by responsibly connecting people, location and device data. The new solution, powered by Neustar’s identity graph platform OneID, transforms data management to enable better data-driven decision making and outcomes for brands by supporting data onboarding, linking, enrichment and validation.

Tableau debuts Business Science

Data visualisation vendor, Tableau, has introduced Business Science, a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered analytics offering which lowers the barrier to data science techniques, enabling business users and analysts to make smarter decisions faster.

Business Science is built to simplify model creation, predictions, what-if scenarios, forecasting and other analytical methods using clicks, not code.
 
Tableau will deliver Salesforce Einstein Discovery in its 2021.1 update later this month, the first major release enabling Business Science. Integrating Einstein Discovery’s real-time predictions and recommendations into Tableau will help people go beyond understanding what happened and why it happened, to explore likely business outcomes and inform proactive action.

Impact acquires Trackonomics

Partnership automation outfit, Impact, has acquired Trackonomics, a supply-side platform (SSP) designed for publishers’ commerce-driven content. This acquisition enhances Impact’s partnership cloud publisher technology capabilities.

Trackonomics provides full-funnel revenue attribution at the page and the link level to enable publishers to make better and quicker decisions: what to write about and who to partner with across all segments and networks in the industry. Impact has led the partnerships category creation, adding 577 new clients in the previous financial year and, in the past few years, has enhanced its platform offerings through the acquisitions of Mediarails, a partnerships-based CRM platform, and, more recently, Activate, an influencer marketing platform.

Financial terms of the latest deal have not been disclosed.

Outbrain partners with KaiOS Technologies

Outbrain, the content recommendation platform, has partnered with KaiOS Technologies, the mobile operating system for smart feature phones.

Under the agreement, Outbrain will monetise KaiOS’ owned-and-operated and third-party inventory globally across over 100 million feature phones through the partnership.

Designed to run on low-spec hardware, KaiOS is a light operating system leveraging open, web-based technologies such as HTML5 to create a rich, intuitive user experience and enable access to essential apps and other internet-based resources. In addition, the open architecture of KaiOS allows developers to easily create apps for KaiOS, reaching a previously untapped audience on smart feature phones.

Blippar closes US$5 million pre-Series A funding round

Augmented reality (AR) technology company, Blippar, has closed a US$5 million funding round. The pre-Series A round was co-led by Chroma Ventures and West Coast Capital, with participation from Globalive Capital investment firm.

Blippar specialises in AR content creation and publishing to any smartphone and the web, and its AR creation and publishing platform, Blippbuilder, is used to create and publish AR experiences easily and efficiently.

The new investment will strengthen Blippar’s position as a leader in AR and will be used to further develop the company’s technology and accelerate its growth in key markets including the US, Europe and Asia.

ActionIQ completes US$100 million Series C extension

Also this week, ActionIQ has completed a US$100 Million Series C funding round extension, led by existing investors and see the opportunity for it in the customer data platform (CDP) market.

ActionIQ serves as a smart customer experience hub for the enterprise, which connects customer data and identities together to create a full view of the customer and their behaviour; provide an AI-powered interface to identify insights in a no-code environment; and enable users to design automated and channel-agnostic customer experiences to drive revenue, retention and customer satisfaction.

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