Location intelligence platform Carto has raised a $61 million Series C, bring its total to $92 million. Carto offers both spatial analysis tools and more than 10,000 data sets organized at different geographic levels around the world. Nearly half its data sets provide demographic information, so, yes, this is relevant to marketers.
Rokt, which places ecommerce ads on ecommerce websites, just raised a $325 million Series E, bringing total funding to $487 million. Rokt shows the ads to customers who have just completed a transaction, presumably reducing any risk to the site owner’s sales. It works with many advertisers, which lets it optimize offers based on each customer’s behavior and context.
While Pegasus (NSO Group) has been in the news for hacking politicians and journalists, new surveillance groups have been identified for using never-before-seen tactics to quietly hack and steal phone data of critics of authoritarian governments. Predator, from North Macedonian company Cytrox, was found by Citizen Lab and Meta (fka Facebook) to be targeting as many as 50,000 victims in more than 100 countries.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.