AI-generated content vendor Jasper just announced a $125 million Series A, which brings its total funding to, um, $125 million.  They somehow accrued 70,000 paying customers on their own.  They also just launched a browser extension that can make suggestions about pretty much any website text, and text-to-image functionality.

Foundry is the publishing and martech part of IDG, which also owns the IDC research firm and is itself owned by the Blackstone investment group.  They just released a contact-level intent data product based on information gathered from titles like CIO and Infoworld, 800+ annual events, and tech including KickFire and LeadSift.  It’s more evidence that the death of third party data is greatly exaggerated.

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.