Video is great but some things are still more fun in person. I’m talking about business meetings, of course. Event management system Bizzabo has just raised $27 million to expand its business, bringing total funding to $56 million.
Are you tired of stories about tying online behavior to real-world store visits, Dear Reader? What once seemed magical now seems common. Still, it’s arguably the greatest revolution in marketing measurement since the dawn of mass media. In any case, here’s another one: Location data company Factual has launched a new product that correlates ad exposure to visits, using data from Factual’s graph of 300 million devices. Marketers can compare exposed to non-exposed groups to estimate incremental campaign impact.
In a bit of a head scratcher, Salesforce has purchased its own nonprofit spin-off, Salesforce.org, for $300 million. The money will go the philanthropic Salesforce Foundation. Salesforce.org, which makes Salesforce software available to nonprofits at deep discounts or for free, will now be part of the for-profit Salesforce.com business. Salesforce expects the change to help it grow sales in the non-profit, education, and philanthropy sectors.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.