Roku has been on a tear recently, signing deals to expand its advertising reach in every direction. Last week it announced an agreement to let Roku ad viewers purchase from Shopify merchants through their TV. It also announced a separate deal with Comcast-owned FreeWheel to expand access to ad inventory, enable targeted based on Roku data, and reduce ad fraud.
Full Circle Insights helps B2B marketers and sales teams measure their results. They were just bought by Scaleworks, which buys and runs low-to-mid market B2B SaaS products. It’s one of relatively few recent private investor acquisitions in martech, suggesting that even bargain hunters are feeling cautious these days.
Publishers are increasingly unwilling to let everyone use their content for free. While most recent discussion has been on payment for news links by Google and Meta, there’s also growing interest in ensuring that AI systems compensate owners whose content is used as training inputs. OpenAI has gotten a bit ahead of the game in a deal with Associated Press, gaining a license to use its stories in return for undisclosed fees and technology access.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.