One more deal: Vista Equity Partners has just purchased 7Park Data, which transforms unstructured data into “contextualized Leading Performance indicators” to help investors and managers predict how businesses will perform. The focus is on financial forecasting but there are probably marketing applications.
So far this week, you haven’t been interested in funding or acquisitions, Dear Reader. Let’s try a nice bankruptcy: Catalina, best known for supermarket cash register coupons, filed for Chapter 11 yesterday to erase $1.6 billion of its $1.9 billion debt. The pre-packaged restructuring will let the company focus on digital media and selling its vast trove of consumer data. Catalina is owned by private equity firms Berkshire Partners LLC and Hellman & Friedman LLC.
Finally, we have the headline “Forge.AI Raises $11M to Decode the World’s Unstructured Data” which delightfully suggests a tiny investment could achieve a huge task. Forge.AI uses natural language processing to extract structured information fro data such as news reports, social posts, and financial filings. Not exactly a new idea – which makes their claim even more charming.
Salesforce has reversed course on its bid to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica a source has told Reuters. Informatica itself said that it is not in talks to be acquired. Salesforce stocks rose on this latest news while Informatica’s fell.