Cloud data warehouse vendor Firebolt announced a $100 million Series C, just six months after a $127 million round last June. Firebolt competes with Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery in a super-hot segment that’s increasingly relevant to CDPs.
Jebbit lets people build interactive quizzes, surveys, lead generation forms and such. They just received $70 million from Vista Equity Partners, which is noteworthy. But I’m more intrigued that they position themselves a “zero-party data platform”, rather than a development tool.
There’s an open opportunity to build dedicated creator tools. Hundreds of creators we surveyed last year cited difficulty in the production and administrative demands of content creation. Pricing and contracting are also major friction points, alongside tech platforms’ shifting rules and algorithms. In some ways, the rapid growth of Latin America’s large creator base is also its challenge: everyone wants to be an influencer. In part, this gold-rush phenomenon has caused a fragmentation of revenues, shrinking paychecks for any single creator.
Here’s a retail story that doesn’t involve a media network – but don’t worry, it does feature Amazon, AI, and Kansas City. Independent retailer Community Groceries will be the first non-Amazon company to deploy the Amazon One entry gate and Amazon’s Just Walk Out checkout technology. Amazon One grants entry after reading your palm or credit card, while Just Walk Out tracks what customers put in their cart and charges for it. O brave new world.