CDP Institute

B2B data compiler 180byTwo has announced Unifi, a “customer data and identity platform” that combines data, identity resolution, intent prediction, and analytics. Partners include Merritt Group, Oracle Data Cloud, Pumatic, Lotame and Marketo. Before your head explodes again, relax: this one’s still in closed beta.

Fraud prevention vendor Kount comes at identity from the angle of judging whether someone is really who they say they are. Kount just introduced the Identity Trust Global Network, which assigns a confidence score to identities asserted during interactions such as payments, account creation, and log-ins. Companies can then act accordingly, smoothing the path for reliable identities and demanding more verification from the sketchier ones.

Cloud database vendor Snowflake has raised $479 million Series G, bringing total funding to $1.4 billion. They also announced a “strategic partnership with Salesforce” which ZD Net reported will include “product, marketing and go-to-market strategy”. https://www.zdnet.com/article/snowflake-raises-479-million-in-funding-but-salesforce-partnership-key/ Since Snowflake powers several Customer Data Platforms, this is intriguing indeed.

Upland Software has purchased mobile app personalization and analytics tool Localytics. It’s the latest of 25 acquisitions including a dozen or so sales, marketing, and call center products. Alas, Upland doesn’t seem to integrate what they buy.

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.

Retina’s founders didn’t get the memo that AI is no longer cool and have positioned their system as using it to predict customer lifetime value. They take the rather hostile attitude that “a majority [of new customers] are poison for the business” and promise to weed the bad ones out quickly. They just raised $5 million from backers who probably expect the majority of their investments to fail but miss the irony.

Meanwhile, you gotta love a planning software company that names its product Plannuh, especially when they’re from Boston. They just raised $4 million for their system to gather all those marketing plans, budgets, and expenses into place. There’s some AI-based analytics but they talk more about reducing waste.

Finally, we have a $2.35 million round for Casted, which offers a software-as-a-service platform to manage branded B2B podcasts. It’s still more proof that B2B podcasting is officially a thing. Speaking of which, tune into the Talking Stack podcast featuring CDP Institute’s David Raab, martech guru Anand Thacker, and MarTech Adivisor editor-in-chief Chitra Iyer. https://www.martechadvisor.com/multimedia/podcasts/series/talking-stack

CDP Optimove has purchased Axonite, a real-time event streaming framework built on Apache Kafka and Confluent. Translating from tech-speak: it will easier for Optimove to ingest, react, and share events as they happen. We can all see the value in that.

Are technophobic marketers an outdated stereotype? Maybe not: 55% of the respondents to this survey from digital asset management vendor Bynder felt automation would harm their branding efforts, although 68% plan to add new martech vendors anyway. Even scarier: the marketer-heavy sample was evenly split on whether marketing (31%) or IT (30%) should be responsible for tech adoption. Let’s be clear: putting IT in charge of martech adoption will not end well.

Even the most tech-savvy marketers are puzzled about the impact of privacy changes. One result – or maybe it’s a cause – is vendors who position barely-related technology as “pro-privacy” solutions. Case in point: Quintesse describes its natural language processing system for understanding the content of Web pages as an alternative to third party cookies. Their pitch is if you can’t target individuals with cookie-based profiles, you can target on page content instead. It’s a tenuous connection at best.