We have a hefty bucket of vendor news today, Dear Reader. First up: cross-channel marketing platform Iterable has closed a $200 million Series E, bringing total funding to $342 million. They offer email, SMS, app messaging, real-time personalization, and a unified customer data store to tie it all together.
Location-based marketing is definitely a trend, although not a new one. Uberall, which helps multi-location retailers ensure they are found when people do a local search, just raised $115 million to continue growing. They also bought MomentFeed, which helps similar companies with local social media and customer sentiment analysis.
Data management software vendor Precisely, which just Monday announced acquisition of Winshuttle, is back in the news with a new self-service digital engagement platform called EngageOne Communicate. This moves them out of the IT department to let business users design and deliver real-time customer interactions. Channels include personalized interactive video, chatbots, email, SMS, and “dynamic PDFs”, which include barcodes and QR codes.
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.