Small business customer communication system Podium announced a $60 million in Series B, bringing its total to $92.6 million. Podium supports online messaging, chat, surveys, and review management. The company has nearly 20,000 businesses as customers.
Data quality vendor Validity has purchased BriteVerify, which verifies email addresses in real time. Over 500 million per month, in fact. It’s Validity’s second acquisition this year, following their purchase of CRMfusion in April.
Meanwhile, a survey sponsored by business-user-oriented data quality tool Paxata found the share of companies with more than 60% of their data in a data lake is expected to nearly double in the next twelve months, from 24% to 42%. Other tidbits: just 15% of organizations have a fully mature data quality process; 72% work with only or mostly structured data; and 37% of data comes from external sources.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.