All the latest martech, customer and adtech news from Tribyl, Salesforce, Lotame, InMobi, Aleo, BigID, Skyflow and ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign raises US$240 million
The biggest funding news this week is from ActiveCampaign, which has raised US$240 million in a Series C round to develop its customer experience automation (CXA) offering.
The round, which brought total financing raised to date to US$360 million, was led by new investor Tiger Global and included new participation by Dragoneer. The Series C investments were completed at a valuation in excess of US $3 billion.
ActiveCampaign plans to investment in product development, ongoing global expansion and acceleration of partner ecosystem initiatives.
“While ActiveCampaign is 18 years old, we started 2016 with 15 people and were completely bootstrapped before our Series A with Silversmith. To have reached over 850 team members and over 145,000 customers in five years is incredible," said ActiveCampaign founder and CEO, Jason VandeBoom.
Adobe releases slew of Experience Cloud enhancement
A decade on from its push into the digital marketing category, the swathe of new product and feature announcements to Adobe’s Experience Cloud announced this week extended the breadth of the platform across not only data-driven marketing orchestration, but also customer journey management, commerce and the marketing function’s operating workflow.
On the first-party customer data front, the big announcement this week is the launch of Adobe’s CDP as well as fresh B2B take on the proposition, the latter offering pre-built integrations with the Marketo Engage platform.
As a further step to support the growing necessity for marketers to embrace first-party data strategies, Adobe has also debuted Segment Match. This offering allows Adobe customers to build first-party data collaboration and exchange partnerships with each other. This is based on enriching matching first-party profiles with segment metadata for better insights and improved personalisation.
Customer Journey Analytics within Adobe Analytics has also been enhanced, including new intelligence capabilities around real-time insights and the ability to integrate and standardise online and offline customer data, while Adobe Journey Optimizer has been natively rebuilt on the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP).
On the ecommerce front, Adobe also debuted a new headless content management offering plus AI-powered product recommendations. While for workflow, the vendor has debuted a new marketing management tool off the back of its US$1.5 billion Workfront acquisition in 2020.
Read CMO's full report on the product announcements here
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Tribyl launches machine learning-based win-loss solution
Buyer intelligence cloud platform, Tribyl, has launched its machine learning-based win-loss analysis product for B2B enterprises of all sizes.
Tribyl’s product uses machine learning to mine both unstructured and structured data, creating a single source of truth across all buying journeys and enabling go-to-market teams to make smarter and faster decisions. Tribyl claims its win-loss insights are unique, proprietary and contextually relevant to each enterprise, as the data is surfaced from the 'digital exhaust' of sales cycles across all deals.
Salesforce debuts latest Service Cloud
Salesforce has introduced the next generation of Service Cloud technology to support changing customer service expectations and provide connected, personalised service from anywhere on one digital engagement platform.
The latest version includes key updates to Service Cloud Voice, Workforce Engagement and Visual Remote Assistant. Service Cloud Voice brings together phone, digital channels and CRM data in one central view for service agents, and offers the agent real-time call transcription and AI-powered guidance on recommended next steps.
There's also a new workforce planning product, Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help service leaders predict how many requests will come into the contact centre, and on which channels. Visual Remote Assistant allows technicians and agents to see what the customer sees through video support, so they can resolve complex issues from anywhere.
Lotame Panorama ID adds new partners
Lotame Panorama ID, which specialises in data enrichment solutions, has announced 10 data partners, including DTScout and ShareThis, will support Lotame Panorama ID, the first global, people-based, privacy-compliant and interoperable identity solution for a cookieless open Web.
With Panorama ID, these data partners will now have access to expanded data collection across all browsers and apps, activated rich data sets across the open web, increased value of publisher partner's inventory and the ability to continue to offer custom audiences to brands and advertisers in a cookieless future.
InMobi launches in-game advertising
Independent marketing platform, InMobi, has launched in-game advertising for brands across the globe to access programmatically on InMobi Exchange.
The latest capability will enable brands to reach mobile users with ads that blend into the game environment, like electronic advertising boards in an in-game sports stadium, an esports arena or the extremely popular casual and hypercasual gaming space.
InMobi Exchange has partnerships with every platforms in the native in-game advertising space including AdInMo, Admix, Adverty, Anzu, Bidstack, Frameplay and Sayollo. The breadth of these partnerships means that advertisers can access this type of premium inventory across the globe at a scale and diversity unmatched by any other mobile supply-side platform today.
Funding news from Aleo, BigID and Skyflow privacy outfits
With news that the next version of iOS is poised to be released, with the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, all eyes are on privacy outfits. This week’s funding news includes a round-up of privacy related announcements from Aleo, BigID and Skyflow.
Aleo has raised US$28 million to build the next-generation platform for decentralised, private applications, with the round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Aleo uses zero-knowledge proof (ZKPs), a cryptographic technique which proves a statement or fact without revealing what makes it true, to provide end-to-end tools. This enabled the development, deployment, and sustainability of privacy-preserving applications.
BigID has raised US$30 million at US$1.25 billion valuation with investment from private equity fund Advent International, through Advent Tech. BigID's platform provides data management for enterprises, combining machine learning-based classification, cataloging, correlation, and cluster analysis to help companies better understand, protect, and derive value from their data.
After raising US$17.5 million in a Series A round late last year, Skyflow has launched a data privacy vault for fintechs. Billed as the industry’s first zero trust data vault, it is delivered as a simple API, allowing fintech developers to quickly build innovative applications without worrying about data security, privacy or compliance.
Placer.ai raises US$50m
Location analytics and intelligence vendor, Placer.ai, has also closed a Series B funding round over the past week, securing US$50 million.
The round was led by Josh Buckley, Todd Goldberg and Rahul Vohra, with participation from Fifth Wall, JBV Capital and Aleph VC. The funding will be used to grow the company’s R&D, expand sales and marketing teams, introduce additional reports and data sets, and grow the recently announced marketplace.
Placer.ai was launched in November 2019 and claims a client list of more than 500 customers including JLL, Taubman, Planet Fitness and Dollar General.
“As a business deeply rooted in offline retail, we expected COVID to present a unique challenge. Yet, adoption actually increased as a result of our ability to introduce certainty into such an uncertain environment,” said Placer.ai CEO and co-founder, Noam Ben-Zvi.
“But our current offering is just the beginning, and we are fully focused on expanding the capabilities both through the development of a range of new features and tools, and the integration of a wide range of data sets through our marketplace. Placer.ai is rapidly becoming the market intelligence platform for anyone with a stake in the physical world.”
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