CDP Institute

The third quarter of 2016 saw 105 VC and private equity deals in martech companies for a total of $2834.6 million, a 1.25% dip compared to Q3 2015. These figures confirm the consistent growth in martech following a massive Q2, where over $5000 million in funding flowed into martech companies. MarTech Advisor currently tracks over 5,000+ companies spread over 44 categories in their martech list, and while different analysts may track the martech sector differently, most reports suggest a fairly substantial and steady growth in martech funding.

Customer data is dynamic due to the many changes consumers go through in the course of their lives.

[Editor’s note: Ah, the ever-popular Gartner Hype Cycle. Love it or hate it, it’s always interesting. Customer Data Platforms appeared for the first time this year, positioned as just starting the climb to inflated expectations. I’d say CDPs a bit further along than that, but agree that we haven’t seen too much hype yet.]

South Africa’s Nedbank is a leader in its market — but to stay in that position, it needed to identify new ways to serve its existing business clientele as well as attract new customers. Its solution: Use the extensive transaction data the bank collects to help customers improve their service.

In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists.  The researchers reported a word  error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month.

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I’ve been surveying the borders of Customer Data Platform-land recently, trying to figure out which vendors fit within the category and which do not.

Leanplum, the leader in mobile marketing, today announced that it closed a $29 million round in Series C funding. The round was led by Canaan Partners, with participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Shasta Ventures. Since its 2012 launch, the company has raised a total of $46.3 million. Leanplum will use the new funding to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering teams and drive aggressive global expansion. Joydeep Bhattacharyya formerly of Shasta Ventures, who recently joined Canaan Partners, will return to Leanplum board of directors.

Today, Urban Airship announced that in less than one year of availability more than 75 companies have adopted its mobile intelligence solutions for open, user-level data accessible to any business system. Businesses like Caesars Entertainment Corp., the Cleveland Cavaliers, Paddy Power and the Sacramento Kings are using Urban Airship Connect and Urban Airship Insight to improve their understanding of customer journeys and power differentiated real-time experiences across channels and business systems.

Swrve, the leading mobile marketing cloud solution, has introduced updates to its Conversations feature to deliver businesses a communication platform specifically tailored for mobile audiences.

PlaceIQ, the company building a new model of consumer behavior by connecting physical and digital activities across time, space, and mobile devices, today announced it has secured a strategic investment from Alibaba Group, the world’s largest online and mobile commerce company. The minority investment from Alibaba Group will help PlaceIQ scale its operations in order to meet accelerating market demand for its technology.

MaxPoint helps marketers in the CPG, retail, finance, insurance and auto sectors deliver messages to customers near local stores that need a marketing boost. Now those marketers are itching to use all the first-party data they’ve collected. To activate advertisers’ CRM data, MaxPoint developed Customer Catalyst, a product that matches brands’ CRM with data showing where customers live and shop.

Marketers may think they are the main drivers behind business intelligence projects, but they really rank well behind operations, executive management, finance and even sales. So says the latest Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study from Dresner Advisory Services.