Zbooni, a technology start-up in the UAE that enables small and medium-sized enterprises to process payments and grow their online presence, secured US$9.5 million in funding that will help fuel the company’s regional expansion. The technology platform supports about 4,000 SME clients and has allowed them to serve more than 150,000 end-customers thus far.
Travel tech company RateGain, which is on track to go public on an Indian stock exchange most likely by year-end, said it was buying Myhotelshop, a hotel marketing technology vendor based in Leipzig, Germany. Since its debut in 2012, Myhotelshop has provided tools to hotels for managing and distributing content and campaigns to metasearch and other partners.
engagement platformExotel, a leading customer engagement company, has raised US$35 million as a part of its Series C funding. Exotel and tech firm Ameyo recently announced their merger. The combined entity will focus on building a full-stack customer engagement platform in the emerging markets to accelerate communication to the cloud and providing conversational AI capabilities for improved customer experience.
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).