CMO’s top 8 martech stories for the week – 25 November 2021

Meltwater buys Oxford Uni AI spin-off
Media intelligence and social analytics supplier, Meltwater, has acquired Oxford University spin-off, DeepReason.ai, as a part of a protracted-time period plan to launch its personal Siri-like knowledge entry expertise. DeepReason.ai was established in 2018 and operates in the subject of AI often known as ‘reasoning’. The genesis for its know-how got here out of the Value Added Data Systems (VADA) analysis mission, funded by UK analysis council, EPSRC. The providing now coming to market is a reasoning engine that may preserve incremental views of information graphs, a core component of AI, fixing what’s is usually a pricey problem of updating and sustaining advanced data graphs at scale.

Meltwater’s buy for $7.3 million features a mixture of money and Meltwater fairness, together with earn-outs contingent on reaching technical milestones and retention necessities.
Meltwater mentioned it ingests and processes greater than 800 million paperwork day by day, extracting new data on over 14 million corporations, 50 million public personas and 75 million matters. This data graph incorporates 2 billion connections to conversations round these corporations, public personas and matters day by day. But as Meltwater government director Asia-Pacific, David Hickey, identified, having the knowledge is just one facet. “But it’s the capability to search out patterns, connections and insights from the knowledge that’s the proverbial needle in the haystack and the sole focus of Meltwater,” he mentioned. “The Deepreason.ai know-how will ultimately allow Meltwater to ship an Alexa or Siri-like expertise, serving to our purchasers throughout APAC discover precisely what they’re wanting for by way of a easy interface. By asking questions like ‘what was the sentiment on my newest press launch’ or ‘inform me my share of voice versus my competitors’, customers will be capable to entry the solutions and insights they want immediately while not having any coaching or setup work.”
DeepReason.ai has 5 full-time and 4 half-time staff, seven with PhD levels, who will all be part of the Meltwater staff. The DeepReason.ai acquisition will probably be Meltwater’s fourth since itemizing on Euronext Growth Oslo in December 2020. Others are enterprise data and group firm, Owler; social intelligence participant, Klear; and media intelligence supplier, Linkinfluence.
Braze makes its IPO debut
Braze shares rose 44 per cent following the firm’s IPO debut on 17 November 2021, elevating its inventory worth to US$520 million on day one. Prior to debuting on the Nasdaq, the buyer engagement tech vendor had confirmed pricing of its IPO of 8 million shares of Class A standard inventory at $65 per share. The IPO included providing 6.7 million shares of Class A standard inventory and the promoting stockholders named in the prospectus providing 1.3 million shares of Class A standard inventory. In addition, Braze granted a 30-day choice for as much as 800,000 further shares of Class A standard inventory. The leap in share worth on day one noticed Braze’s market worth climb to $8.5bn and inventory worth improve to $93.39. At time of press, the firm’s shares had been buying and selling at $74.05.   
Braze’s (previously Appboy) platform permits manufacturers to ingest and course of buyer knowledge in actual time then use it to orchestrate and optimise contextually related, cross-channel advertising campaigns. The firm is headquartered in New York with workplaces in Berlin, Chicago, London, San Francisco, Singapore and Tokyo. Braze reported a internet lack of $26m on income of $104m for the six months to July 31 2021, in contrast with a lack of $12 million on income of $68 million a 12 months earlier, based on filings. Customers consists of IBM, DraftKings, Car Next Door and iHeart Radio. OpenText to accumulate Zix Corporation
Information and digital asset administration firm, OpenText, has acquired Zix Corporation as a part of efforts to each strengthen its e mail safety and compliance capabilities and handle the SME market. OpenText has confirmed plans to buy all frequent shares in Zix through its wholly owned subsidiary, Zeta Merger, at US$8.51 per share, or a complete of US$860 million. The deal is anticipated to contribute instantly to natural development in cloud and annual recurring revenues and be accretive to EBITDA. Zix Corporation offers SaaS-based mostly e mail encryption, menace safety and compliance cloud options for SMEs. The deal follows OpenText’s acquisition and integration of Carbonite and Webroot in December 2019, additionally each working in the SME area with safety-associated choices. “We intend to combine Carbonite, Webroot and Zix merchandise to create a powerhouse SMB platform for knowledge safety, menace administration, e mail safety and compliance options,” mentioned OpenText CEO and CTO, Mark J. Barrenechea. “Acquisitions of cloud development belongings like Zix highlights our dedication to our complete development technique and method to money-based mostly returns.”
Barrenechea famous Zix will deepen OpenText’s know-how and go-to-market relationship with Microsoft. Zix has 5600 MSPs, additionally paving the manner for cross-promote alternatives in the OpenText and Zix clouds. OpenText additionally this week introduced it’s buying community detection and response (NDR) know-how participant, Bricata, to elevate safety and cloud safety throughout its platform and innovate in the rising NDR market. Financial phrases weren’t disclosed. Tapjoy goes purchasing
Mobile promoting and monetisation platform, Tapjoy, has launched its new Tapjoy Shopping in-app market. The new providing permits customers to buy from lots of of name retailers and earn rewards in most well-liked apps for every buy made. It’s based mostly on the firm’s core cellular commerce proposition of offering customers with rewards for participating in promoting and promotions and is being made out there through the firm’s community of 10,000 app companions.
Tapjoy Shopping is an unique retail complement to the firm’s core Offerwall promoting market, which has been round since 2006. This provides customers social and cellular app forex for participating with promoting affords resembling app installs, surveys and reductions. These are searchable by product class, manufacturers and different filters. There’s additionally a graphical illustration of all related affords and the forex worth of creating every buy. For retail manufacturers, Tapjoy mentioned participation is predicated on a pay-for-performance pricing mannequin. Tableau acquires Narrative Science        
Yet one other acquisition featured on this week’s spherical-up comes from Salesforce-owned knowledge visualisation vendor, Tableau. The firm has bought US-based mostly Narrative Science, a knowledge storytelling participant, for an undisclosed sum.
Ten-year outdated Narrative Science is concentrated on serving to folks perceive and act on knowledge units. Its president and co-founder, Neil Beil, mentioned signing a definitive settlement to be acquired by Salesforce and changing into a part of the Tableau staff would assist it lengthen its attain and additional realise this imaginative and prescient. “Bringing Narrative Science’s automated knowledge storytelling capabilities to Tableau’s highly effective analytics platform will redefine the future of information and analytics,” he acknowledged in a weblog put up. “Narrative Science has been a accomplice of Tableau for a number of years and we’re thrilled to deepen that collaboration to assist Tableau increase its choices in quite a lot of mediums together with language-centric mediums like Slack.

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“This mixture will assist us attain thousands and thousands extra people who find themselves underserved with knowledge and can assist them achieve success in the digital-first world.”  
Narrative Science indicated additional product bulletins are on the manner as soon as the transaction closes. More latest enhancements included automated knowledge storytelling providing, Lexio, which each generates knowledge stories in addition to builds out visible representations of them. Last 12 months, the firm added augmented knowledge discovery, expanded knowledge ingestion performance and a dynamic newsfeed to the platform. Anyword raises US$21m
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform for serving to enhance advertising copy, Anyword, has secured US$21 million in its newest fundraising spherical. The newest spherical was led by Innovation Endeavors with participation from Lead Capital and Gandyr Ventures. It brings complete raised funds by Anyword so far to US$30m. The cash will probably be used to recruit extra staff from product to engineering, construct out the know-how platform and onboard clients. Anyword launched in March 2021 and makes use of AI instruments resembling Natural (*25*) (*8*) (NLP) to offer predictive metrics round the success of promoting and advertising copywriting, from topic strains to textual content messages, descriptions and subheads. It does this by utilizing AI to analyse billions of messages and duplicate throughout industries, channels and advertising targets. NICE and Google Cloud strengthen collaboration
NICE and Google Cloud have described their choice to raised combine platforms as driving smarter digital conversations and enhancing self-service experiences. NICE is integrating its cloud-based mostly, AI-powered CXone buyer expertise platform with Google Cloud Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI), a gaggle of software programming interfaces (APIs) for contact centre use instances. The pair mentioned the mixture will present companies with extra refined and environment friendly methods to have interaction and assist clients throughout digital and human interactions. For instance, NICE’s CXone Virtual Agent Hub permits companies to increase buyer self-service capabilities by way of conversational bots for voice and chat. By leveraging Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI, companies can quickly combine Google Cloud Dialogflow self-service bots with none coding. In addition, these utilizing CXone Agent Assist Hub can now use Google Cloud’s Agent Assist to present staff actual-time, automated data help throughout reside chat interactions. “As AI-powered digital assistants proceed to turn into a extra essential a part of the customer support combine, contact centres need flexibility and selection in deploying conversational AI bots,” NICE CXone CEO, Paul Jarman, mentioned. “NICE’s collaboration with Google Cloud illustrates dedication to innovation and integration with main suppliers.” Aqfer secures US$11m
Our remaining capital elevating story of the week is from advertising knowledge platform startup, aqfer, which secured US$11m in a Series A funding spherical Led by Resolve Growth Partners.

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Aqfer, which was established in 2018, is pitching itself as a subsequent-era enterprise knowledge platform resolution aiming to assist corporations higher get to the fact about their clients and their knowledge. It’s yet one more instance of the totally different approaches being taken in the quickly rising buyer knowledge platform (CDP) area. Like an ‘aquifer’, aqfer mentioned its resolution features as a ‘semi-permeable container’, permitting advertising knowledge to be collected from all present methods, refined after which distributed to advertising and promoting platforms for use. It additionally claims to be taking a contemporary method to the CDP proposition by offering detailed knowledge, and a capability for software program integrators to procedures whereas working immediately in the advertising knowledge lake. Don’t miss out on the wealth of perception and content material offered by CMO A/NZ and signal as much as our weekly CMO Digest newsletters and knowledge companies right here.   You also can comply with CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, participate in the CMO dialog on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, comply with our common updates through CMO Australia’s Linkedin firm web page          
 

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