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.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.