Stockholm-based CDP Data Talks has raised $1.4 million for its first round of venture funding. It may not seem like much but remember that Sweden is a small country and it’s more impressive if you describe it as 11.5 million Krona.
Small business marketing platform Constant Contact is buying marketing automation and CRM vendor Sharpspring for $240 million, or about 8x revenue. The deal will further expand Constant Contact’s offerings, which already include email, ecommerce, websites, and social media advertising. Sharpspring has specialized in selling through small marketing agencies.
Salesforce and Amazon Web Services are expanding their alliance, making it easier for developers to share data, workflows, and services between Salesforce and AWS applications. A separate announcement described new low-code development features for the Salesforce Platform. It also preannounced some new privacy and identity management features, but let’s talk after until they’re actually released.
The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.