Let’s chase some money today, Dear Reader. We’ll start with a $300 Series F funding for Branch, bringing total funding to $667 million. Branch lets marketers create links that point users on all platforms to specific locations within their app, and measures how different options are working. Sounds simple but it’s not.
Analytics platform DataSelf has launched a new version of its data loading system, designed to remove the frustrations of constantly changing data sources. They’re a bit vague on what’s different but say it took four years to build, so let’s assume it’s a major improvement.
Not far behind, data connection company Starburst announced a $250 million Series D, for a total of $414 million. Starburst lets companies create write SQL queries that join data from different sources in a data lake, data warehouse, data mesh, or other data mess. It doesn’t do the complicated data preparation you’d want in a CDP.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.