All that fancy AI is nice but most companies would be happy just to make customer interactions a bit less taxing – through a good messaging system, for example. Gupshup has built a $150 million business on that premise, and just raised $240 million to grow it further, bringing total funding to $384 million. The funding announcement includes a singularly unimpressive chatbot named Gupper that answers a few questions about the deal.
The modest ambitions of RPA are far from the grand vision of AI systems that autonomously optimize the entire customer experience. MoEngage sits at the grandiose end of that spectrum, using AI to automatically map the customer journey, discover micro-segments of similar customers, and find the right offer, channel, and timing for each micro-segment at each step. Somebody’s buying: they added more than 250 new customers over the past year and just raised a $32.5 million, bringing total funding to $73 million.
Luxembourg’s data protection authority has charged Amazon €746 million ($888 million) for violating EU GDPR data protection rules. Amazon, which is also under scrutiny in Europe for antitrust, claims this is ‘without merit,’ and plans to appeal.
Salesforce has reversed course on its bid to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica a source has told Reuters. Informatica itself said that it is not in talks to be acquired. Salesforce stocks rose on this latest news while Informatica’s fell.