CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 29 September 2022

All the latest martech, adtech and customer technology news from Livewire, Trendii, Sendinblue, Contentsquare, Qlik, Databricks, Microsoft, UiPath, Flatfile and Toluna.

Livewire raises $4.7m to scale business

Australian gaming marketing and gametech startup, Livewire, has raised over $4.7 million in Series A funding to scale business in Australia, Europe, Southeast Asia and India.

The company develops integrated gaming marketing solutions for advertisers. Established in Australia, it’s also had early success in Mumbai, Singapore and London, and picked up high-profile clients such as Uber Eats, Foxtel Group’s Binge and Warner Music Australia.

The Series A funding is earmarked for headcount, new market entry and extension of Livewire’s proprietary gametech platforms. The oversubscribed round was led by cornerstone investor, RealVC, and included participation from Perennial Private Ventures, Alua, co-founder of Hills Cider Company, Toby Kline, founding regional president of EA Asia-Pacific, Nigel Sandiford, and strategic investors within the gaming ecosystem. RealVC managing partner, Matt Berriman, now joins Livewire’s Board.

Livewire co-founders and co-CEOs, Brad Manuel and Indy Khabra, said they started Livewire to focus on the whitespace within the gaming marketing and tech ecosystem. Globally, the gaming audience encompasses 3 billion unique users per day.

“We’re excited for this next phase. Our Series A funding round will enable Livewire to scale up and invest in our gametech products, talent, and our business operations,” the pair said. “We’re adding new skills and staff to continue to drive growth within the gaming marketing sector with our unique offering.”

Aussie adtech secures $2.9m

Also securing seed funding this week is fellow adtech business, Trendii. The company has raised $2.9 million in funding led by Investible and a strategic media partner.

Trendii provides a B2B contextual commerce platform within image and video content using proprietary AI technology. Its customer sweet spot is fashion and homeware ecommerce brands.

The funding will provide the startup with capital to continue to enhance its product, invest in new technologies, build more product categories, grow its partnerships team and expand to new international markets. Trendii’s client base includes Daily Mail, Are Media, News Corp and PopSugar.

“We’ve followed Aaron’s journey since 2018 and have been consistently impressed by his ability to translate a vision into a groundbreaking business,” Investible investment manager, Jayden Basha, commented. “When the Trendii platform evolved from a standalone D2C app into a B2B contextual advertising platform, the company’s potential skyrocketed. Trendii is a frontrunner in new advertising technology, empowering brands and revolutionising contextual commerce.”

Sendinblue acquires Yodel

SMB-focused digital marketing platform, Sendinblue, has acquired Yodel, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based digital receptionist for SMBs.

According to Sendinblue, the acquisition will help SMBs up to 15 days per person per year in effort, improve customer support and drive more sales amid an uncertain economic environment. Financial details were not disclosed.

Sendinblue said customers will be able to improve customer satisfaction and increase sales by integrating Yodel.io, which has successfully processed millions of calls since launching in 2016. The digital phone system features a digital receptionist that uses advanced voice technology such as conversational interactive voice response (IVR), cross-device management, as well as deep integrations with tools like Slack.

It’s the fifth acquisition within 12 months by Sendinblue. Others included Chatra (chatbots), Metrilo (analytics) and PushOwl (push notifications) for US$47 million last year, plus meetings management tool, MeetFox, earlier this year.

“The addition of Yodel.io furthers our mission of reducing digital marketing costs for SMBs while creating additional touchpoints for customer success,” said Sendinblue founder and CEO, Armand Thiberge. “Business owners need ways to strengthen customer relationships while controlling their costs, and we’re continuing to invest in and expand the Sendinblue platform to meet those needs.”

Qlik connects up to Databricks

Qlik has announced two enhancements to its partnership with Databricks aimed at making it easier for customers to combine its data analytics solutions with Databricks to advance cloud analytics strategies.

The first is the launch of the Databricks Lakehouse (Delta) Endpoint, a new capability in Qlik Data Integration to simplify customers' ability to ingest and deliver data to the Databricks Lakehouse. It does this by optimising continuous and real-time data ingestion through an integration into Delta Lake on Databricks.

Second is the integration of Qlik Cloud with Databricks Partner Connect, enhancing the Qlik Data Analytics trial experience with Databricks. Qlik also recently integrated Qlik Cloud with Databricks Partner Connect.

“We’re excited about the potential of Qlik’s Databricks Lakehouse [Delta] Endpoint to seamlessly and efficiently deliver the data customers need to drive more value from their investment in the Databricks Lakehouse,” said Databricks VP of technology partners, Roger Murff. “And, with Qlik Analytics now integrated with Databricks Partner Connect, we are making it even easier for customers to discover, use and share data-driven insights across their organisations.”

Contentsquare debuts analysis, find and fix capability

Contentsquare has launched new speed analysis, find and fix capabilities as part of its all-new Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) offering.

The digital analytics vendor said new functionality is designed to help businesses better understand the impact of website speed on customer experience and conversions, and to improve website performance accordingly. To do this, Contentsquare’s new DEM capability combines speed analysis synthetic and real user monitoring (RUM), giving brands a complete diagnosis of speed and user interaction, including Web vital metrics. Synthetic monitoring gauges site speed over time to benchmark the performance of a company’s website against competitors.

“First impressions are crucial, as we know from observing a 50 per cent cross-industry bounce rate. What kind of first impression do you give when your website is lagging and not responding? Combining Speed Analysis Real User Monitoring [RUM] and Synthetic Monitoring means you can address site speed from all angles and provide your customers with the best web performance,” claimed Contentsquare chief product officer, Lucie Buisson.

Contentsquare’s Find & Fix also includes discovery capabilities such as Session Replay, Technical Root Cause, Text Search, Error Analysis, Impact Quantification, Speed Analysis RUM and Synthetic.

Flatfile scores US$50 million for data exchange offering

Data exchange vendor, Flatfile, is another securing the big dollars this week, raising US$50 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global.

Investors participating include Gradient Ventures, Scale Ventures, Workday Ventures, Afore Capital, and Two Sigma Ventures with angel investors including founding executives and leadership from Airtable, DocuSign, LinkedIn and Gainsight. This brings Flatfile's total funding to nearly $100 million to date.

The latest investment will enable the three-year-old company to expand and support enterprise customers in the quest to improve data exchange speed and efficiency. The vendor’s 500-strong client list includes Sage, ClickUp, Square, AstraZeneca, CBRE and Spotify.

“Flatfile is only just at the beginning of its journey to modernise how data is exchanged," Flatfile CEO, David Boskovic, said. "This funding will enable us to continue to grow our engineering team and deliver ready-to-use data across SaaS and beyond."

The company said it plans to shortly release a major update enabling developers to build directly on top of Flatfile's underlying platform components, such as import, match, merge, export, so they can stitch together all the pieces required to move information to and from their systems.

Toluna unveils automated multimarket research technology 

Consumer insights and research firm, Toluna, has launched new automated multimarket research capabilities on the Toluna Start platform to simplify set-up to analysing global data.

The technology update is targeted at customers looking for a centralised report model incorporating all markets for easier global analysis. Key features include expedited speed-to-launch, the ability to unite datasets in a single report for analysis, and the ability to seamlessly import questionnaire translations or add them in-platform using Toluna’s interface.

“Having the ability to execute global research is not enough. Businesses around the world need simple, efficient, agile, and scalable solutions to manage their multimarket studies,” said Toluna CEO, Frédéric-Charles Petit. “The addition of our new multimarket research capabilities reflects our commitment to continuous innovation by providing our clients with a simpler, faster route to actionable insights – at a time when speed to obtaining scalable, high-quality insights is key to businesses around the world.”

UiPath collaborates with Microsoft on future of automation

Microsoft and enterprise automation software vendor, UiPath, are bolstering their strategic partnership to collaborate on new automation experiences and integrations.

Microsoft Azure is the preferred cloud platform for UiPath, while UiPath is a preferred enterprise automation partner at Microsoft. The latest agreement sees the pair working on more automation solutions powered by Microsoft Azure to market by using UiPath automation capabilities within Microsoft Office. Today, UiPath is available to purchase directly in the Azure Marketplace and via private offers and will integrate with Microsoft Power Platform by early 2023.

UiPath has more than 80 integrations within its business automation platform across Office 365 and Teams in Modern Work; Power Platform and Dynamics 365 in Business Applications; and Cognitive Services and SQL Azure in the Azure Data and AI solution areas. As part of the strategic partnership, Microsoft is committed to helping UiPath and joint customers expand upon these market-leading integrations in the Microsoft platform and offerings.

UiPath and Microsoft also plan to integrate UiPath cloud products and services with a range of Microsoft commercial cloud services, publish UiPath products on the Azure Marketplace, and jointly market industry-specific solutions, among other activities.

The announcement came as UiPath also released new features to support pp development and expand automation use cases. These include updates to UiPath Studio Web, a browser-based automation development tool, aimed at bringing automation creation to cross-platform users and distribute automation at scale across an organisation. New capabilities allow users to create public-facing processes and apps for customer service and value chain scenarios to streamline customer experiences, as well as access a connection builder to simplify API connection to in-house applications and specialised industry solutions.

Continuous discovery then helps customers discover the as-is state of processes and tasks. Upgrades include an automation Hub with ROI comparisons between estimated benefits and actual outcomes, Process and Task Mining improvements include new analytics for better process insights based on AI.

UiPath said it’s also leveraged its acquisition of Re:infer to add Communications Mining to the platform so users can analyse emails, documents, chat logs and social messages for business data and new opportunities for automation.

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