CDP Institute

Email is apparently a hot investment right now. Email creation platform Stensul just raised a $16 million Series B, bringing total funding to $23 million. It seems odd that there’s a market for a stand-alone email builder, but, apparently, there are enough enterprise marketers wanting a best-of-breed solution to keep Stensul growing.

Marketing automation platform Selligent has been purchased by CM Group, which owns other email companies including Sailthru, Campaign Monitor, Emma, and Delivra. The deal adds AI capabilities to the CM Group portfolio and will enable Selligent to expand mobile messaging, analytics, and real-time personalization. Selligent was owned by private equity firm HGGC, which bought it in 2015.

Here’s what’s trendier than privacy-safe customer data: AI-driven, location-based privacy-safe customer data! simMachines has it covered with personifyAI, which takes a brand’s location-based customer data and uses explainable AI to assign customers to meaningful audience segments. AND they have lower-case company and product names. It’s beyond trendy: it’s trend-tastic!

Speaking of trends, what could be trendier than privacy-safe customer identities? Data collaboration company Karlsgate has introduced Karlsgate Data Exchange, which employs “encrypted, single-use pseudonymized tokens” (okay, those last two are redundant) to match data sets without sending personal identifiers to a trusted third party. The approach is trendily named “Cryptoidentity” but, mercifully, doesn’t seem to involve Bitcoin-style cryptocurrencies.