Tidio helps small retailers and other businesses improve customer service through automation. They do mostly chatbots and live chat but also offer a unified inbox for messages from email, social networks, ecommerce, and other systems. The company just closed a $25 million Series B, bringing total funding $26.8 million.
Marketing automation vendor GetResponse has enhanced its support for ecommerce merchants. New features include one-click integrations with ecommerce platforms, a product recommendation engine, improved segmentation, transactional emails, a website popup builder, and automation templates. Ecommerce systems were once very separate from marketing systems, but that gap is almost gone.
Clearview AI, known for scraping billions of facial recognition images without consent and running afoul of privacy regulators in numerous countries, has met its match in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Clearview’s agreement to settle the ACLU’s 2020 lawsuit which stated the company violated Illinois’ BIPA biometrics law means the company can’t continue to sell its software to most US companies, and sets a precedent that state privacy laws can have impact beyond state lines.
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.)