Salesforce has quietly raised $317.2 million in new equity funding, according to SEC documents. The company made no public announcement. Presumably it is refilling cash reserves depleted by the $6.5 billion Mulesoft acquisition in March and the $800 million Datorama acquisition in July.
Here’s a fiendish little test, Dear Reader. I know you’ll read even trivial news about the likes of Salesforce and Adobe, but does that curiosity extend to serious-but-unflashy companies like Informatica? They’ve just announced a slew of enhancements to their master data management, cloud data integration, and data privacy products. It’s all directly relevant to customer data management, so you should be interested. Then again, it’s Informatica.
More bad news for Facebook: while consumers list Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the top ten most ethical companies, Facebook doesn’t appear in the top twenty. This from brand research agency Morning Consult, in a report with much advice about businesses taking social and political positions. Mostly they suggest you don’t.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.