Treasure Data has secured $234 million in funding, mostly from parent company Softbank. So far as we know, it’s the largest CDP round ever. You may recall that Treasure Data was purchased by Softbank-owned Arm in 2016 and became independent again earlier this year, with Softbank retaining a major ownership position.
Finally, funding. Apollo.io just raised a $32 million Series B for its prospecting data system, which has collected 220 million business contacts by scanning the web and collecting data from freemium clients. And Merge announced a $15 million Series A for its B2B data integration platform. Merge handles all types of data, not just customer information.
Microsoft has announced its Customer Experience Platform, which includes a collection of existing Microsoft products including their CDP, the catchily-named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Other components offer data governance, machine learning, website analytics, journey orchestration, ad campaigns, ecommerce, sales and service. It’s not clear what’s actually new here, although there may be more prebuilt integrations than before.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.