Fast-growing journey orchestration vendor Autopilot has received $12 million in funding, bringing its total to $32 million. Unlike conventional marketing automation systems, Autopilot draws on data stored externally through integrations including Segment, Zapier and Salesforce.com. In fact, Salesforce Ventures is among the new investors. Autopilot reports more than 2,300 customers.
Back in April, Experian announced it was selling a majority stake its cross-channel marketing unit to Vector Capital and Peter McCormick, co-founder of ExactTarget. The new company just announced its name will be Cheetah Digital, restoring the CheetahMail brand that was the core of the Experian unit. The new operation will offer a SaaS-based digital marketing platform that assembles customer data and executes cross-channel campaigns.
I know what you’re thinking: we haven’t mentioned artificial intelligence yet this week and it’s already Tuesday. Never fear. Start-up Quantifi has launched a tool whose AI “coaches marketers through creating a successful digital strategy by providing insights and recommending the most effective next steps.” The system recommends, runs, and evaluates tests of audience segments, creative options and channels, drawing on an ever-expanding proprietary database of past results for many companies. They have more than $2 million in seed funding.
CDP Twilio Segment has added an Amazon Redshift connector (in public beta) to Linked Audiences. This enables Segment queries to integrate data residing in Redshift without importing it. Similar connectors are already available for Snowflake and Databricks.