There’s a growing trend to doing commerce within social media and messaging. FastForward.ai is on it, with a platform that enables mobile operators and enterprises to create digital engagement, commerce and payments inside social and messaging apps. They just announced that an $8 million seed round of funding.
Today’s theme is “odd couples”. First up: contact center software vendor Serenova is merging with video conferencing vendor Lifesize. The connection may seem tenuous but remember that Serenova was purchased in 2016 by Marlin Equity Partners, which then backed Serenova’s acquisition of Telstrat call analytics in 2017 and ProScheduler workforce scheduling in 2019. The stated goal is a “holistic unified communications portfolio”
Europe’s base of home-grown Customer Data Platform vendors grew rapidly in 2019, according to the CDP Industry in Europe 2020 report from the Customer Data Platform Institute. The number of vendors grew by 73% and employment grew by 80% during the year. Estimated revenue for Europe-based firms reached €260 million.
Scope3 is expanding into brand safety and fraud detection turf of Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify. Amazon DSP is the first company to integrate Scope3’s Agentic Media Platform, which eliminates made-for-advertising, fraud, non-brand-safe, and climate-risk inventory by default. A separate Brand Standards product, built on top of the Agentic Media Platform, lets companies connect with expert AI agents to apply additional content standards.