CDP Institute

Treasure Data has announced a new pricing model that removes compute costs from the equation. Fees will now be based on number of customer profiles and behavioral events such as website visits and email activities. The new approach allows companies to reduce cloud data warehouse compute costs by shifting some data and processing to the CDP while still accessing cloud data warehouse files directly when appropriate.

It won’t be long before we lose track of all the companies helping marketers to manage how their company appears in AI search results. But for now it’s still interesting enough to report that Profound, whose AI agents monitor results, generate content, and runs campaigns, has just raised a $35 million Series B. The company has reached more than 500 customers since launching less than one year ago.

Pendula started life in 2017 as an email and SMS messaging platform, and has since grown to include complex experience workflows, analytics, and AI agent-based conversations. They’ve just been acquired by Smart Communications, which specializes in omnichannel engagement for highly regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, and healthcare. Price wasn’t announced but Pendula had $25.6 million in funding and 57 employees.

We somehow missed B2B data compiler HG Insights’ June acquisition of software review site TrustRadius but at least we’re on top of their latest news: they are buying sales intelligence vendor MadKudu and combining everything into a “Revenue Growth Agentic Ecosystem.” MadKudu brings CDP-style data integration, no-code agent creation, and connectivity across enterprise AI systems including Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Agentforce, ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Using simulated humans rather than real ones to test marketing ideas apparently works just fine. Interpublic Group reports their Acxiom unit has used worked with simulation expert Aaru to select campaign audiences and messages with good results. The companies are now expanding their relationship to add predictive simulation to campaign design models in Interpublic’s Interact marketing platform.

Here’s a rare marketing study based on actual campaign results. Netcore Cloud analyzed their top 1,000 campaigns to find what’s working. The conclusions won’t necessarily surprise you: consumers want value, convenience, and service, and marketers are getting good value from AI-driven personalization. But it’s nice to know they’re real.

If AI is the new Gold Rush, then supporting tech vendors are the merchants who get rich selling shovels to the prospectors. None is more foundational than Google Cloud, who have just expanded their Data Cloud with new data engineering agents, tools to integrate with external agents, and improvements to their data platforms. Most notably, they’ve announced a new Spanner columnar database engine for high-speed real-time queries, addressing one of the biggest weaknesses in cloud-stored data.

BigID offers another set of foundational services, focused on data privacy and security. They’ve just launched their own AI support tool, called TRiSM (stands for Trust, Risk, Security Management). The platform continuously monitors AI risk, triggers remediation workflows, and enforces policies based on model behavior, data sensitivity, and organizational requirements. Both AI-powered and AI-enabling.

Identity intelligence expert Forter is aiming for a piece of the AI shopper bot action. They’ve just added services to identify AI agents when they visit ecommerce websites, detect potential agentic fraud, and report on trends in agent behavior.

Two revenue orchestration leaders, Clari (839 employees per LinkedIn) and Salesloft (1,198 employees), announced a merger yesterday. Clari provides a massive database of business information while Salesloft helps salespeople optimize their activities. The deal is expected to close before the end of this year.

Digital experience platform (and CDP) Contentstack announced that its EDGE platform is now available in the AWS Marketplace. EDGE, launched in February, combines Contentstack’s headless content management system, personalization, AI, customer data management, analytics, and journey orchestration. It includes features drawn from the Lytics CDP that Contentstack purchased in January.

Salesforce announced it will buy Waii, which sells a natural language-to-SQL translation engine based on a sophisticated semantic map of a company’s data assets. Price was not announced; Waii has 15 employees and no previous funding. Its technology will bolster data access in Data Cloud and Tableau, supplementing the Informatica acquisition that Salesforce announced in May.