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.
GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads. The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles. GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.