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.
Salesforce’s Dreamforce mega-conference is next week and the company’s publicity elves are already working overtime. In the first of what are sure to be daily announcements this week, the company announced 100+ industry-specific prompts, data models, and AI capabilities across its fifteen industry clouds. It also launched an AI Use Case Library to house its industry-specific AI offerings.