Today’s newsletter is brought to you by the letter V. We’ll start with VTEX, an integrated commerce platform that just raised $140 million in what’s apparently its first investment round. The 20-year-old vendor supports more than 2,500 online stores in 28 countries. It’s a helpful reminder that not every major system is owned by one of the giant software vendors.

Chatbot vendor Intercom found that sales bots now outnumber customer service bots, a switch from earlier days when service bots were more common. Both types of bots speed response and save money but 87% of consumers still prefer humans for quick interactions. Fun fact: there are more than 2,000 chatbot vendors.

A U.S. district court judge has ruled that Google acted to create illegal monopolies in online advertising technology in a way that blocked competition and allowed higher ad prices to be charged. Google will appeal; meantime, the government will decide what to ask the court to do to remedy the monopoly. Google also faces a new U.K. antitrust lawsuit over its dominance of search.