All funding news today, Dear Reader. Top item is a $50 million Series D for AI-powered retail personalization vendor Bluecore, bringing its total raise to $113 million. Unlike BlueConic, BlueVenn, and Blueshift, Bluecore is not a CDP. They do have a rare pricing model based entirely on shared customer success.
Marketing and sales departments lag in their adoption of agile techniques, according to this report from Digital.ai. Software development (37%) and IT (26%) were most frequent users, compared with 7% of marketing and 5% of sales and sales operations teams. Just 51% of respondents said agile is used by more than half of all teams in their company.
In another bit of business-as-almost-usual, open source web development framework Gatsby has raised a $28 million Series B, bringing its total to $47 million. You may have thought WordPress, Drupal, and others had the open source Web CMS business locked down, but Gatsby lets developers create Web sites by stitching together separate cloud-based services. It’s APIs all the way down.
It’s tough to get brand safety right, but the industry keeps trying. IPG Mediabrands announced a new set of tools to find and block inappropriate ad placements, while IAS expanded its suitability measurements to include standards from the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). Meanwhile, DoubleVerify admitted a mistake made brand safety on X/Twitter look worse than it really was in October 2023 and March 2024.