SoftBank, the Japanese bank that has spawned several unicorns in Latin America, announced it will launch a second fund under its Opportunity Growth Fund to raise and invest US$150 million in Black and Latino-led startups. The new fund expects to deploy the US$150 million within three years, and SoftBank will be a limited partner.
Running its data clean room software on cloud platforms is Habu’s basic function, so it set up a Microsoft Azure integration some time ago. Today it announced a deeper relationship using Azure’s confidential computing environment, which combines hardware and software protections for greater security. You can read this blog post for technical details.
The Latin American accelerator of Chilean origin, Platanus Ventures, presents its sixth generation amidst the boom in investments in early-stage startups. Batch 6 of Platanus Ventures is filled with startups in the marketplace industry and software as a service (SaaS), but it also includes other sectors such as edtech, proptech, or the innovative web3.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)