Piano is another company that doesn’t call itself a CDP but still builds unified customer profiles. Their focus is supporting subscription businesses with features ranging from subscription sales to personalized experience creation to recommendations to audience segmentation. They just raised a $20 million Series C plus $68 million in debt, on top of a previous $28 million.
Klaviyo rather slyly describes itself as a “customer data and marketing automation platform”, which may or not mean they claim to be a CDP. They do build unified profiles with data from ecommerce systems and web sites but it’s not clear they support all the inputs required by a CDP or make the resulting profiles easily available. What is clear is they’ve just raised a $320 million Series D at a $9.15 billion-with-a-b valuation, and have doubled their customer count to over 70,000 in the past year.
Explorium clearly isn’t a CDP but it also gathers data in its own way. Specifically, it analyzes predictive models and searches its library for external data sources that could help the models work better. They just raised a $75 million Series C. They also released an interesting survey on external data acquisition: 62% use external demographics data and 51% collect anonymized individual data.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.