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.
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).