I’d finish with news that Salesforce is buying article writer Narrative Science, but we covered that last week. So I’ll switch to other messaging, where API-friendly communications platform Vonage was just purchased by Ericsson for $6.2 billion. Martech vendors like Twilio are Vonage competitors.
Also recently, marketing copy generator Anyword raised $21 million, bringing its total to $30 million. They say their system can be trained to copy your brand voice and/or to tailor copy versions for different customer segments. Just a few days before that, writing assistant Writer reported its own $21 million round. Then we have this (hilarious) piece about – and partly by – writing assistant Sudowrite and its $3 million seed round.
OpenText, which provides a range of content, document, security, and experience management solutions, is buying email security vendor Zix for $860 million. The company says it will add Zix to SMB data protection platform, which is based on its 2019 acquisition of Carbonite and Webroot.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.