Like the gold rush merchants who made more money selling shovels than the prospectors who bought them, digital analytics vendors have built a very profitable niche. Mixpanel is one of the leaders, and they just raised a $200 million Series C to continue that growth. The deal brings their total funding to $277 million and puts their valuation at $1.05 billion.
Retail media includes both ads on ecommerce web sites like Amazon (boring) and ads on retail media network sites owned by retailers like Albertsons, Lowes, and Best Buy (fun!). Leave it to eMarketer to put things in perspective with a report that ecommerce ads account for just under 90% of the total $31.5 billion that will be spent on U.S. retail media in 2021, leaving the nascent retail ad networks with a fairly minor $3 billion or so. That’s just 2% of the $150 billion total U.S. digital ad spend.
ThoughtSpot also sells tools to data miners. Their special power is letting users query cloud databases in natural language. They just brought their total funding to $674 million with a $100 million Series F at a $4.2 billion valuation.
It’s deal-making time for generative AI model builders and publishers who can provide them with quality data. Germany publishing giant Axel Springer is trading access to its data for Microsoft adtech, AI, and Azure hosting solutions. Meanwhile, The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content with attribution of summaries and quotes.