Integrate last week announced a $34 million acquisition of Akkroo, which captures leads at in-person events. The deal fills a gap in Integrate’s ability to smooth the flow of data between marketing and sales.
Now for some good news: integration of marketing stacks has improved sharply over the past two years, according to Walker Sands’ State of Marketing Technology 2019 report. Compared with the 2017 study, companies with an integrated best of breed stack rose from 27% to 34% and those using a single vendor suite rose from 21% to 27%. Limited piecemeal and fragmented best of breed stacks fell from 42% to 17%. Just 7% reported they have no marketing technology, compared with 17% in the earlier report.
Finally, identity verification vendor Onfido has raised $50 million in new funding from Salesforce Ventures among others. Total raise is now $100 million. Onfido verifies consumer identities remotely by comparing a video selfie against a photo of a government identity document. It uses AI to ensure the document is authentic and that the person in the selfie matches the photo ID.
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.