CRMNEXT, the digital and customer experience platform for enterprise banks & financial service providers globally, announced $16M in Series B funding co-led by Avataar Ventures and Ascent Capital. Headquartered in India, CRMNEXT is currently servicing almost 100 large global enterprises in the banking and insurance space. Their customer base includes HDFC, SBI, Arab Bank, and Metlife.
India’s leading Live Commerce Mobile SaaS provider, SWIRL, is introducing enhanced Live & Interactive Video Shopping Experiences to the Indian market. It uses technology that is scalable, and adds a proprietary Interactive layer on top of video, using Text, Chat, WhatsApp, SMS, & Voice to make the entire experience close to real-life shopping.
Google announced the list of startups for the second cohort of ‘Google for Startups Accelerator Middle East and North Africa’, a three-month digital accelerator programme for Seed to Series A technology startups based in the region. The twelve technology startups come from six Arab countries across automotive, agriculture, fitness, fintech, real-estate, e-commerce and entertainment.
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.