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.
So far this week, you haven’t been interested in funding or acquisitions, Dear Reader. Let’s try a nice bankruptcy: Catalina, best known for supermarket cash register coupons, filed for Chapter 11 yesterday to erase $1.6 billion of its $1.9 billion debt. The pre-packaged restructuring will let the company focus on digital media and selling its vast trove of consumer data. Catalina is owned by private equity firms Berkshire Partners LLC and Hellman & Friedman LLC.
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.
Just over one-third of marketers plan to either buy a new CDP (21%) or replace an existing one (13%) this year, according to this Optimove survey. Unfortunately, it doesn’t report how many have a CDP already in place, which would put the other values in perspective. It does seem that CDPs are a relatively low priority: they rank sixth on the list of new systems and eighth on the list of systems to replace.