The News Gods delivered three identity resolution items today, Dear Reader. Maybe they got a volume discount. First is Merkle’s announcement of the Merkury (get it?) Identity Resolution Platform, which helps brands and publishers create, enhance and share private identity graphs. Partners include publishing, identity data and adtech firms. Applications include programmatic trading of cookie-free customer IDs. Head explodes.
Habu, which just came out of stealth with $15 million in funding, calls itself a “marketing data operating system” for “stitching together marketing and advertising data from multiple platforms to deliver a relevant consumer experience across all channels”. That sounds like a CDP but they are taking a non-CDP approach that includes analyzing data inside the “clean rooms” offered by Google, Facebook and other walled gardens. The founders held senior positions at Krux and Salesforce, which either helps or harms their credibility.
Definitely not by coincidence, two Localytics co-founders have announced their next business, which they’ve been working on since leaving Localytics more than a year ago. Demand Sage will offer automated customer analytics to small and mid-sized businesses. It will initially extract data from Hubspot, uncover useful insights, and place the results in Google Sheets.
Tofu has raised $12 million in Series A funding to support the ongoing development of its AI-powered unified marketing platform. Identifying worsening “martech bloat” as a problem for GTM teams, Tofu is proffering its platform as an integrated marketing solution with gen AI embedded. This intended to avoid the adoption of multiple AI-related tools with overlapping functionality.