Account-based marketing platform 6sense makes no claim to galactic dominance, but its home page headline “Know everything so you can do anything” carries its own whiff of excess.  Returning to reality, they just bought Fortella, which offers pipeline planning, forecasting and measurement tools.  Readers with a long memory or Crunchbase account will recall that 6sense bought B2B CDP ZenIQ back in 2018.

It’s a potpourri today, Dear Reader. Here’s news that rockstar martech investors Vista Equity Partners have purchased a majority stake in conversational commerce vendor Drift, reportedly at a $1 billion-plus valuation. Details weren’t announced but I guess we can’t call Drift a chatbot vendor anymore.

With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).