Money money money. I avoided funding announcements on Wednesday but I can’t resist sharing that privacy management vendor OneTrust has raised a $200 million Series A. Yes, privacy is big business and getting bigger.
The Federal Trade Commission has reportedly approved a $5 billion settlement with Facebook over privacy violations. The deal was widely criticized as a slap on the wrist and the company’s stock price rose after the announcement. But it’s still by far the largest privacy fine ever and roughly twice the maximum 4% of revenue allowed under GDPR.
Despite consumer doubts, marketers have clearly begun to think that privacy is good business. Exhibit 1: when Marketing software company Cheetah Digital announced purchase of interactive experience platform Wayin, they described it in terms of collecting “zero party data” for permission-based marketing. Exhibit 2: Neustar has opened its “Identity Data Management Platform” to data from Freckle, which pays consumers directly for access to their information.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.