CDP Institute

Here’s a surprise: large enterprises are using substantially fewer apps today than three years ago (843 vs 1,020), according to this Mulesoft survey. The authors credit “rationalization”.  Other results are more expected: just 37% say their IT departments completed all the projects that were requested, 90% have problems with data silos, and only 18% have completely connected their customer experiences across all channels. Still, a single customer view ranks last in the list of digital transformation challenges.

Shared APIs are one way to reduce development backlogs.  Algolia is riding that wave with an API that lets users search for content within website and enterprise applications.  They’re used by more than 10,000 companies and just raised a $150 million Series D, bringing total funding to $338 million.

We don’t write much about cryptocurrencies because they’re flaky and we are Serious People.  Then again, there’s no one more sober than 137-year old NCR, and guess what: they just bought cryptocurrency software provider LibertyX.  The deal will ultimately let NCR clients at banks, retailers, and restaurants manage cryptocurrency payments.   We are shocked.

Salesforce is buying robotic process automation (RPA) vendor Servicetrace, which will become part of its MuleSoft integration platform business.  RPA lets companies automate existing processes without making changes to underlying systems.  It’s been hot as companies seek to improve productivity and agility without making large IT investments.  Think of it as a type of no-code development.

The modest ambitions of RPA are far from the grand vision of AI systems that autonomously optimize the entire customer experience.  MoEngage sits at the grandiose end of that spectrum, using AI to automatically map the customer journey, discover micro-segments of similar customers, and find the right offer, channel, and timing for each micro-segment at each step.  Somebody’s buying: they added more than 250 new customers over the past year and just raised a $32.5 million, bringing total funding to $73 million.

All that fancy AI is nice but most companies would be happy just to make customer interactions a bit less taxing – through a good messaging system, for example. Gupshup has built a $150 million business on that premise, and just raised $240 million to grow it further, bringing total funding to $384 million. The funding announcement includes a singularly unimpressive chatbot named Gupper that answers a few questions about the deal.