Which of the following would you say was “all the rage last year”: coronavirus, metadata, or rage? The folks at Atlan vote for “metadata”, and have just raised a $50 million Series B for their system to create an “active metadata platform” that creates a “unified discovery and collaboration experience”. It’s all about making a company’s data more accessible and manageable, which should definitely reduce the rage in some departments.
Social media monitoring vendor Brandwatch is acquiring Paladin, which helps brands manage influencer marketing campaings. The deal lets Brandwatch expand from reporting on social media to helping brands create it. (I’m linking to a press release because I couldn’t enter Brandwatch’s site without accepting cookies.)
Metadata management is about empowering technical people: if it has an opposite, it may well be integrated tools for business users. Apollo.io has closed a $110 million Series C for its B2B sales prospecting platform, which combines a 220-million name B2B contact database with sales workflow automation. The company says it has over 15,000 paying customers and is used by more than one million people over all.
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.