Customer journey mapping is a hot space. It just got a bit hotter with a $2 million seed round for StrategyBox, a marketing analytics platform that builds journey maps. They use AI to recommend the most effective content, ads, and actions.
CDP and messaging platform Blueshift reports on data from 14.9 billion messages sent through the system. They found that trigger-based email outperforms batch email by 497%, triggered push notifications outperform batch push by 1490%, and trigger campaigns using both channels are 283% more effective than single channel campaigns. No mention of campaign volumes, which are likely much smaller for triggered messages.
What’s that, you wish you didn’t have to manage any databases at all? Fauna is at your command with a serverless “data API” that lets you read, write, and manipulate data without worrying about the back-end details. Sounds crazy but we live in an age of wonders. They just raised $27 million, bringing their total to just under $60 million.
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.