Lily AI, which generates product classifications directly from images, has just raised a $25 million Series B.  Lily AI says it measures over 15,000 attributes rather than placing products within standard taxonomies.  Automated classification removes a major obstacle to on-site search, product discovery, recommendations, and demand forecasting.

The second half of 2024 saw the CDP industry continue its shift towards embedding CDPs in customer-facing systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Nearly all firms new to the report had added a CDP to an existing product, and major acquisitions including ActionIQ, Lytics, and mParticle were all made by customer management vendors. The new report adds coverage of composable CDP vendors, which is still a much smaller sector than conventional CDP systems.