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.

Twilio is adding ‘contextual awareness’ to its Segment CDP, which in plainer English means data stored in Segment will be available when creating event-triggered, real-time messages. This and a redesigned journey architecture are part of Twilio’s “next generation” customer engagement platform, which also includes natural voice AI agents, voice and text analytics, and RCS and WhatsApp messaging. Twilio separately announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to speed the adoption of conversational AI for customer engagement.