Times are even tougher for adtech than martech. The bankruptcy of one-time leader MediaMath was especially jarring, not to mention painful for advertisers left holding $125 million in unpaid bills. MediaMath assets were just purchased for a fire-sale price of $22 million by video ad buying platform Infillion.
IPOs may be hard to find but venture funding still happens fairly often. Latest deal is a first-time external raise of $20 million for Beamer, which helps companies manage product engagement by sending announcements to customers and collecting their feedback. As product-led growth becomes more important, this sort of tech will creep closer to the center of the martech stack.
t was fun while it lasted, but the “how cool is that?” stage of generative AI adoption is now being replaced by the boring work of figuring which products are best for your purpose. Arthur is making things a bit less painful with Arthur Bench, an open source tool to compare performance of large language model systems. They’ve also published the first in a series of comparisons among popular products.
BetterUp and Stanford Social Media Lab define workslop as “AI-generated content that looks good, but lacks substance.” Their survey of 1,150 full-time desk workers in the U.S. finds that 40% received workslop in the last month, costing $186 per month per employee. For a 10,000-person company, that’s $9 million annually.