Finally, we have the headline “Forge.AI Raises $11M to Decode the World’s Unstructured Data” which delightfully suggests a tiny investment could achieve a huge task. Forge.AI uses natural language processing to extract structured information fro data such as news reports, social posts, and financial filings. Not exactly a new idea – which makes their claim even more charming.
Customer identity data vendor Infutor has purchased Ruf Strategic Solutions, which provides customer segment data and marketing automation. The deal caps two years of strong growth at Infutor, following a strategic investment by Norwest Venture Partners. Looks like third party data isn’t dead.
How popular is intent data? Well, 35% of companies use it when measuring audience coverage, according to a survey for B2B data vendor DealSignal by Demand Gen Report. That compares with 87% for contact information, 45% for account characteristics, and 40% for product usage. More worrisome: only 20% use third party data to improve their information even though 60% are less than “mostly confident” that their current data is adequate.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)