CDP Institute

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.

Dun & Bradstreet is accepting beta customers for Analytics Studio, which combines predictive modeling, visualization, and the ability to merge a client’s own data with D&B data and “alternative sources” such as technology installs, debtor information, intent data, and commercial property records. Not exactly a CDP although D&B purchased Lattice Engines last year and you might see some resemblance.

CDPs help customer service teams provide consistent experience across channels. I’ll just mention that since I otherwise wouldn’t have excuse to discuss this UJET survey about support channel preferences. The main message is that consumers want a wide choice: more than half wanted to text, email, chat, phone, and upload photos, screenshots, and videos. Channel preferences differ by age group except for Facetime, probably because Grandma already uses it to bond with the grandkids.

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.

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.