Finally, Upland Software just bought B2B content curation platform Kapost. Price was $50 million on $15 million revenue. You may recall that Upland bought email automation vendor PostUp at a similar ratio just last month. It’s what they do.
Salesforce has introduced a “the first low-code blockchain platform for CRM”, a claim that’s narrow enough to be true. Open source Hyperledger Sawtooth technology lets Salesforce users can create blockchain objects the same way they’d create other custom objects and share them across networks in workflows and apps. Lots of practical potential. The platform will be generally available in 2020.
Selligent, a B2C marketing execution platform, doesn’t claim to have a CDP but does offer what they carefully call “CDP capabilities”. They seem to mean that they build multi-source customer profiles but use them within the Selligent platform. They’ve just added a customer information management tool that helps brands comply with privacy regulations. GDPR features are in place and CCPA is on the way.
It’s deal-making time for generative AI model builders and publishers who can provide them with quality data. Germany publishing giant Axel Springer is trading access to its data for Microsoft adtech, AI, and Azure hosting solutions. Meanwhile, The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content with attribution of summaries and quotes.