CDP Institute

It’s funding all the way down today, Dear Reader.  We’ll start with CDP Lexer, which just raised a $25.5 million Series B.  Lexer is unusual in providing an interface for customer service agents as well as traditional CDP data unification and sharing capabilities.

Next, ABM platform Terminus announced a $90 million Series C, bringing total funding to $120 million.  Terminus focuses on sales and marketing execution, but also includes a Data Studio that it calls “an embedded CDP”.

Lob – which is Bol spelled backwards – provides software and a print delivery network to streamline personalized direct mail production.  They just raised their own $50 million Series C, bringing total funding to $80 million (according to their Web site) or $121 million (says Crunchbase).  If they also claim to have a CDP, I missed it.

CDP Blueshift just raised a $30 million Series C, bringing total funding to $65 million.  The company calls itself a ‘SmartHub CDP’, indicating it provides AI-based analytics (“Smart”) and journey orchestration (“Hub”).  In CDP Institute terms that would be a “Campaign CDP” but we’ll admit that “SmartHub” sounds cooler.

CDP Exponea announced API-level integration with data quality and enrichment services from Acxiom.  The deal isn’t unique: Acxiom also lists integrations with Adobe, Boxever, Tealium, and Treasure Data.  But it’s still worth noting that tighter integration of CDPs and third party data vendors is becoming more common.  You may recall that Exponea was purchased last month by recommendation engine vendor Bloomreach.

Data analytics vendor Actian has released Customer 360 Solution, which it doesn’t call a CDP but still sounds like one.  The new solution loads data from disparate sources into Actian’s high-speed Avalanche database, generates insights, and shares the results with customer-facing systems.  The company says business users can set up the data connections without writing code.

It might be a sin to enjoy seeing Facebook attacked from all sides, but it’s worth it.  Having lost the battle against arbitration on news content payments to Australian publishers, the company now faces a joint push from Microsoft and major European publishers for similar rules.Meanwhile, a bipartisan coalition of U.S. legislators has proposed letting small publishers jointly negotiate news content payments without facing antitrust penalties.

I’m sure there’s a reason that Tel Aviv-based Web analytics start-up Oribi named itself after a small African antelope, although it might simply be an excuse to make hoodies with horns.  Their fashion sense extends to their product positioning, which adds trendy no-code bling to Web analytics.  The company just raised a $15.5 million Series B, bringing total funding to $27.9 million.

As adtech vendors scramble for cookie substitutes, it’s easy to confuse ID systems used for targeting and systems for attribution.  The big difference is that targeting systems need to identify as many people as possible while attribution systems can use a sample.  Nielsen’s ID resolution system, announced last November, is aimed squarely at attribution: it uses first party data such as email addresses and device IDs to build a comprehensive picture of behaviors for a limited set of people and then validates the results against Nielsen panel data.  They just... Read More >

Fifty seven percent of companies polled in this Merkle study are personalizing experiences in at least five channels and 59% have a consolidated customer profile.  But consumers are not impressed: just 35% say that marketing and advertising meets their needs.  Lots more here on CDP adoption, who’s in charge of CX, and obstacles to using data.

Investors are clearly impressed with Highspot.  The sales enablement company just raised a $200 million Series E, doubling its previous total of $197 million and valuing the company at $2.3 billion.  Highspot says that usage also doubled from 2019 to 2020.

Low-code development platform Creatio also has new money, taking $68 million in its first round ever. In addition to its development tools, Creatio offers a prebuilt CRM with marketing, sales, and service systems including a unified customer database. Users can modify these to their hearts’ content.