Email vendor Campaign Monitor has merged with email vendors Emma and Delivra. Each will be sold separately under the Campaign Monitor umbrella. Campaign Monitor and Emma serve mostly small businesses while Delivra serves more advanced marketers. You may recall that Campaign Monitor purchased the Tagga customer data platform back in March 2017.
Mobile marketing vendor Urban Airship has raised a $25 million Series F, bringing its total financing to $100.9 million. Urban Airship orchestrates and personalizes messages across mobile apps, email, Web push, and SMS and connects with other channels via an open API.
I have a slew of other items about AI being used for cool things including seeing around corners https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/12/researchers-develop-ai-for-detecting-objects-behind-walls-with-a-single-photo/, rendering 3D objects from photos https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/14/googles-deepmind-develops-ai-that-can-render-3d-objects-from-2d-pictures/, and delivering packages via two-legged robots (creepy!) https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/agility-robotics-building-two-legged-cassie-robot-and-delivery-robots.html.
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.