And for the AI news hat trick: predictive modeling vendor Custora announced a $13.75 million Series B funding, bringing its total to $20 million. Custora builds unified customer profiles and uses the data for analytics, predictive models, and segmentation. Its clients are retailers.
Digital experience platform Episerver has been purchased by private equity investor Insight Venture Parnters in a deal valued at $1.16 billion. Episerver combines ecommerce, Web content management, multi-channel marketing, and personalization. It’s another example of private investors buying of customer management systems that might otherwise have gone public.
Speaking of excited, Account-Based Marketing vendor Demandbase has a new Targeting Solution that it says “offers the scale of Google along with the precision of LinkedIn”. The big deal here is they can now target ads and Web site personalization at individuals, not just companies.
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.