CDPs are fun, but they’re just a tiny corner of the martech industry. Adobe has provided today’s reality check by paying $1.275 billion for Frame.io, whose very narrow function is to provide review and approval functionality for video creators. That’s not to say Frame is insignificant: they have about 275 employees and claim more than one million users.
There’s a geeky sort of comfort in applying the familiar build vs buy debate to CDPs. But the boring truth is every company will do a mix of both. Twilio Segment has further blurred, or maybe clarified, the issue with a new Developer Toolkit that helps technical staff tailor their Segment CDP to their own business needs.
InfoSum’s niche is privacy-safe data sharing in a data clean room-ish fashion. It’s a capability some CDP vendors have (BlueConic just announced one) and others are likely to add through building, buying, or integration. InfoSum itself just raised a $65 million Series B, bringing total funding to $90 million.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.