All the latest martech and adtech news from Genesys, Marketplacer, Integral Ad Science, Sprinklr, Yellowfin, Singular, Qlik, UiPath and ActiveCampaign
Marketplacer secures $38 million investment
Marketplace technology vendor, Marketplacer, has secured a $38 million funding injection in its largest capital raising round to date.
The company provides a platform for brands, retailers, suppliers and communities to build online marketplaces. The latest funding is earmarked for US expansion, to broaden the product suite and accelerate the partner program. Marketplace has raised $85 million to date.
The latest investor round included existing supporters, Acorn Capital, Ellerston Capital, Endeavor Asset Management, Lennox Capital Partners, Mirrabooka, OC Funds, Salesforce Ventures and SG Hiscock. Fresh faces in the mix included Fifth Estate, Washington H Soul Patterson and Wunala Capital.
According to Marketplacer, bookings have tripled over the past six months compared to the six months prior. Founder, Jason Wyatt, said businesses were increasingly recognising a marketplace strategy as the next big step forward in ecommerce. Its 100-strong customer list includes Woolworths, Barbeques Galore, HMD Global and Circulate.
“This latest funding round enables us to continue our focus of offering enterprise clients modern, intuitive and scalable technology which has flexibility and ease on how they integrate services, applications and providers,” Wyatt said. “At the same time, it will enable us to amplify our sales and marketing efforts and accelerate our product development, taking our offering to enterprise customers in the United States, Asia-Pacific and beyond.”
Marketplacer has its roots in BikeExchange, an online marketplace for anything and everything bike.
Genesys secures US$580m
On a much larger fundraising scale is Genesys, which just secured US$580 million for its customer experience management platform. The latest investment brings its market valuation to $21 billion.
Leading the latest round were Salesforce Ventures, with participation from ServiceNow and Zoom.
“Two years ago, we saw the challenge businesses faced in meeting the expectations of consumers and employees around digital experiences. We realised we had an opportunity to transform not only our company but the overall industry," said Genesys CEO and chairman, Tony Bates. "We believe this fundraise, including raising from leading strategic investors, validates the achievements we have made to date and will accelerate our continuing efforts to expand and realise the vast experience-as-a-service market opportunity ahead.”
It’s been a couple of years of change for Genesys, which has been pivoting to a cloud-based, subscription-oriented approach. The vendor said cloud and subscription bookings made up more than 90 per cent of total new bookings during this time, while the group grew 100 per cent year-on-year during the first half of fiscal 2022.
The company also recent debuted its Genesys DX solution, offering a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and digital experience product pitched at sales and marketing functions. And it acquired Pointillist and Exceed.Ai in October.
Yellowfin’s new guided natural language features
Analytics vendor, Yellowfin, has taken the wrappers off its new version 9.7, introducing general availability of guided natural language query (NLQ) capabilities.
The aim of the new functionality is to enable any users regardless of skill or expertise to ask data questions in natural language and receive answers with the platform via visualisations and reporting. These can also be integrated throughout the platform and explored in more detail via the advanced report builder. The vendor is claiming guided NLQ is a step change in self-service analytics.
Other enhancements available in the new platform version include multi-chart canvas and tabular report support in the Yellowfin mobile app, fresh dashboard and present widgets features such as the new ‘ask question’ way of transitioning from dashboard and presentation data to asking the next question on action buttons. The Stories feature has also been integrated with guided NLQ.
Integral Ad Science expands Context Control
Digital media quality software vendor, Integral Ad Science (IAS), has expanded its Context Control solution for advertisers and publishers globally with the aim of giving them more control over the context of digital ad placements.
Thanks to the enhancements, users can leverage more than 300 contextual segments from IAS on a pre-bid basis to protect advertising from undesirable content as well as to seek out target content. Context Control is integrated with a number of major DSP platforms including Adelphic, Adform, Amobee, MediaMath, Xander and Yahoo.
The vendor has also released a Context Control Optimisation solution for publishers, allowing them to activate segments directly in ad servers to avoid or target contextually relevant content.
“We first launched Context Control to help our customers transform their targeting strategies, and it’s already prepared them to successfully navigate a cookieless future. Advertisers need these critical tools to customise their campaigns, while publishers need to drive greater monetisation,” said IAS CEO, Lisa Utzschneider.
Singular marketing measurement launches
US-based startup vendor, Singular, is proclaiming an industry-first with the launch of its new Private Cloud for marketing measurement.
The aim of the game is to give major mobile brands control over their growth stack, marketing measurement and sensitive user data. It does this by providing a data clean room where brands can manage collecting, hosting, processing and enriching sensitive marketing data safely.
The platform complies with a raft of privacy and data regulations such as GDPR, along with rules for Apple iOS and media platforms such as Google, Facebook and TikTok. Users can also set specific privacy rules relevant to their businesses, such as time data is stored or ensuring user IDs are hashed. There are also capabilities for sharing and access datasets while still controlling the process.
The latest launch follows 18 months of private beta testing with several mobile gaming companies.
“We were the first to launch support for privacy-safe marketing measurement via SKAdNetwork because we believe the future of attribution is safe, secure, and privacy-compliant,” Singular CEO, Gadi Eliashiv, said. “We’ve been working on Singular Private Cloud for almost as long to give major mobile brands full access and control to the best marketing measurement capability in the industry in their own environments and under their own supervision.”
Singular’s marketing attribution and analytics platform customers include Lyft, Doordash, LinkedIn, WB Games, Warby Parker and Twitter.
Qlik and UiPath partner up
Qlik and UiPath have struck a partnership to directly integrate their active intelligence and enterprise workflow management solutions.
The partnership will mean users can leverage Qlik Cloud to drive actions through the UiPath enterprise automation platform. This could include prioritising tasks in downstream applications. The latest partnership complements automation already available in the Qlik Application Automation offering and is aimed at helping teams trigger immediate action across the data and analytics supply chain.
“Organisations embracing ‘active intelligence’ are eager to integrate and automate data flows from all of their different sources into Qlik for analysis, insights and downstream action,” Qlik chief product officer, James Fisher, explained. “The integration with UiPath expands the ecosystem of technology partners integrating and adding value to the Qlik Active Intelligence Platform and will enhance the automation capabilities already in place with Qlik Application Automation. Users will now be able to trigger an expanded range of actions and automated workflows from Qlik into their essential daily tasks in key applications like ERP, CRM and HR, while also impacting crucial and timely focus areas such as supply chain management and customer service.”
ActiveCampaign ups its B2B marketing game
Digital marketing automation platform, ActiveCampaign, has debuted a fresh range of B2B marketing resources to tie in with its CXA platform.
On the list of new product functionality is an email designer to prioritise easy-to-use features and reliable formatting. Customers can sign up for Early Access now before this is released broadly next year.
ActiveCampaign also recently launched its Sales Engagement Automation offering for aligning marketing, sales and customer support, as well as custom objects to expand the ability to unify and take action on customer data from any solution integrated with its platform. Other tools on offer for B2B marketers a ‘pages’ templates to help businesses create professionally designed landing pages, more email template options as well as those for content marketing, communications plans and email copywriting, plus an automation library of 750 recipes to assist with implementing automated processes and tasks.
Sprinklr gets Gold for sustainability practices
Social media management vendor, Sprinklr, has achieved a Gold Sustainability Rating from EcoVadis in recognition of its sustainable business practices.
To get the second consecutive year’s accolade, Sprinklr was assessed on its environmental, social and ethical performance. It also means the company scored within the top 5 per cent of companies rated by EcoVadis and in the top 1 per cent for its sustainable procurement process.
Sprinklr’s commitment to the environment and sustainability is based around four main objectives: responsible installation of telecommunications networks; the use of eco-efficient practices in the consumption of natural resources; promoting a circular economy in the treatment of waste through reuse and recycling; applying environmental criteria when procuring supplies for the business.
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