Data pipeline companies also aren’t complete CDP systems but perform the key task of ingesting data from many sources. Airbyte, an open source platform that offers prebuilt data connectors, just raised a $26 million Series A for that sort of thing. And Jitterbit, a more established data connection company, just bought eBridge Connections, which specializes in e-commerce and B2B integrations.
“Headless CDP” is creeping up the buzz chart. Mostly it refers to CDP systems that build profiles and let external systems provide activation and other user functions. But “headless” could also describe CDP functions built into cloud data management systems like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. For example, Experian has just made its real-time address, email, and phone validation APIs available within the Azure Marketplace. This makes it just a bit easier to build a CDP-like database within Azure.
Databricks loads data into a cross between a data lake and a data warehouse that it, inevitably, calls a “lakehouse”. They’ve just made it easier to build data ingestion pipelines, to build a unified catalog of the ingested data, and to use the data without exporting it. Again, not quite a CDP but the boundaries get blurrier every day.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.