Coincidence or not, here’s another acquisition story. Getir, the “ultrafast” grocery delivery company that promises to deliver orders within 15 minutes, is buying Fresh Direct, which serves the New York regional market. Don’t get too excited; Fresh Direct services will continue as before. I think we can chalk this up to consolidation as the crazily-competitive and complex last mile delivery market adapts to post-Covid reality.
As if on cue, we have news that programmatic media services provider MiQ is buying Grasp, which offers media governance and data quality technology. As you surely know, the programmatic buying chain is convoluted, opaque, and other bad things, so Grasp’s ability to reduce errors can only help. MiQ purchased “privacy-first” audience platform (is there any other kind these days?) Air Grid one year ago almost to the day.
Norrsken22, a Pan-African venture capital firm, has achieved the final close of its debut fund, raising a total of US$205 million, surpassing its initial target. This also highlights a keen interest from institutional investors in supporting African startups at an essential phase of their journey.
Self-described composable CDP GrowthLoop is making its AI-powered audience generation available as a native app on Snowflake Data Cloud. This means marketers will be able to use the solution without their data leaving Snowflake. Having the audience generator running alongside the data should increase campaign launch velocity.