CDP Institute

Healthcare is a growing industry for CDP deployments. Ours Privacy, a year-old CDP specializing in healthcare, has expanded its features to include an integrated consent management platform. The company announced a seed funding round although it didn’t share the amount.

TakeUp isn’t a CDP: it’s a rate optimization system for independent bed & breakfasts, boutique hotels and glamping retreats. But there’s a good chance it’s managing customer data as the basis for its decisions, even though it reads that data from the client’s property management system. The company just raised an $11 million Series A.

SE Ranking spent more than a decade building its suite of search engine optimization tools, only to have gen AI search raise a new set of challenges. Aiming to accelerate delivery of new solutions, the company just bought social media management platform Planable. While Planable doesn’t measure gen AI search results, it does help companies create social media posts that support gen AI search success.

If I had a nickel for every “first-of-its-kind fully agentic AI marketing platform”, I’d have, well, a lot of nickels. Adtech vendor Mobiquity just launched its version of the breed, CMOne, which combines AI content creation, social media publishing, advertising campaigns, and a performance dashboard. Although Mobiquity says the tool lets users manage “every component of their marketing strategy,” it seems to have a few gaps including a CDP and email.

Adtelligent also has a new “all-in-one” system, in its case for retail media. Retailers gain control over ad inventory, monetization and shopper experience, delivering ads across all digital and physical touchpoints. The system includes a built-in CDP, server for on-site, off-site, and in-store ads, and attribution.

Big tech vendors including Amazon argue loudly and often that they have a right to freely scrape data from publicly-available web pages. So let’s raise an eyebrow at news that Amazon has blocked AI agents from Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, and others from scanning its own site. The goal, of course, is to ensure that shoppers visit Amazon rather than reading AI search results.

Nothing like a little acquisition news to brighten your morning, eh Dear Reader? The emphasis here is on little: Salesforce announced a deal to buy tiny AI-prospecting platform Bluebirds, which shows 15 employees on LinkedIn and $5.5 million in funding on Crunchbase. Price wasn’t announced but could probably be assembled from spare change in Salesforce break-room couch cushions.

We noted yesterday that tools to help companies improve their visibility in AI-generated search results have quickly become too common to count. MCP (Model Context Protocol) connectors are also well on their way to becoming table stakes. We have recent announcements of MCP connectors from Informatica (along with many other new features) and Audiense, as well as MCPEval, a tool from Salesforce researchers that tests agent performance using MCP servers.

Here’s another on-trend item: Opera has announced an “agentic browser” for public release later this year. Like similar AI Agent from OpenAI and Copilot mode in Microsoft Edge, the new offering will let AI agents autonomously execute tasks through the browser that would otherwise require the user to push their own keyboard buttons. What could go wrong?

Digital analytics vendor (and owner of ActionIQ CDP) Contentsquare continued its expansion with acquisition of Loris AI, which analyzes AI-based and human customer support conversations. The system identifies the reasons behind customer calls, emerging issues, and churn signals. Price was not announced but, for context, let’s note that Loris AI had raised $19 million (per Crunchbase) and has 68 employees (per LinkedIn).

You might have thought the window to launch new B2B marketing automation platforms closed long ago, but when the founders of Conversion “dove into marketing and became experts” they decided otherwise. Their efforts have borne fruit in a user base of 4,000 companies over two years and, now, a $28 million Series A to expand their platform which features a drag-and-drop email builder, “magic blocks” for dynamic content, real-time CRM and enrichment synchs, no-code workflows, and dynamic audience segmentation “that just works.”

Systems to help companies manage their appearance in genAI query results have gone from new to normal virtually overnight. Last week we were intrigued enough to note an offering from Meltwater; today we have announcements of roughly similar products from Optimizely, Kalicube Pro, Scalenut, and Adthena. And those are just the ones who made enough noise to gain our attention.