Explorium clearly isn’t a CDP but it also gathers data in its own way. Specifically, it analyzes predictive models and searches its library for external data sources that could help the models work better. They just raised a $75 million Series C. They also released an interesting survey on external data acquisition: 62% use external demographics data and 51% collect anonymized individual data.
Piano is another company that doesn’t call itself a CDP but still builds unified customer profiles. Their focus is supporting subscription businesses with features ranging from subscription sales to personalized experience creation to recommendations to audience segmentation. They just raised a $20 million Series C plus $68 million in debt, on top of a previous $28 million.
Cloud-based communications platform Twilio is buying toll-free messaging platform Zipwhip to expand its multi-channel message delivery capabilities. Price is $850 million in cash and stock. Growth of multi-channel cloud platforms is one of the trends we’ve been watching. You’ll recall that Twilio bought the Segment CDP last year for $3.2 billion.
Enterprise AI vendor Uniphore has acquired CDP ActionIQ and cloud data engineering system Infoworks. The combination of products will create a Zero Data AI Cloud that simplifies AI deployments by enabling companies to access data for AI projects without moving it from existing systems. Prices were not announced.