CMO's top 8 martech stories for the week - 8 December 2022

All the latest martech and adtech news from Rokt, BigCommerce, Frame AI, Crownpeak, Local Measure, Chattermill, Operative Intelligence and Amperity.

Rokt increases valuation to US$2.4 billion

Ecommerce tech company, Rokt, has confirmed a secondary transaction led by Square Peg and Wellington Management has increased its company valuation to US$2.4 billion.

The news comes less than 12 months after the company raised US$325 million in its Series E fundraising round. This was seen as the largest single venture raise in Australian history and was led by Tiger Global.

Founded in Australia ten years ago, and now headquartered in the US, Rokt’s machine learning technology has powered more than 5 billion transactions globally for more than 2500 companies including Fanatics, Live Nation, AMC Theatres, PayPal, Uber, Hulu, Staples, Lands’ End and HelloFresh. Rokt joined the fastest-growing private companies in the US on the Inc. 5000 list in 2022, its second listing in a row.

In a statement, Rokt noted it had achieved multiple significant new partnerships in 2022, including with Uber and AMC Theatres. The company is also continuing to hire for roles across its business globally and has plans to open a second North American product development centre on the West Coast in 2023. The valuation and extra funding is all part of Rokt’s preparation for an IPO debut.

“Despite broader market declines in valuations, we continue to see rapid growth in Rokt driven by new ecommerce partners and an uplift from advertisers,” said Rokt CEO, Bruce Buchanan. “Due to the challenging economic climate, ecommerce companies are focusing on more relevant customer experiences that improve economics and deliver new revenue. This has further propelled Rokt’s growth and we’re pleased to see this expression of support from existing investors as Rokt looks towards an IPO.”

BigCommerce debuts StagingPro

BigCommerce has taken the wrappers off a new staging environment platform for teams to more quickly and efficiently develop and deploy multiple store builds using one dashboard.

The ecommerce platform vendor has completed a tech partner integration of StagingPro, a staging and deployment suite that gives enterprise merchants and agency developers a collaborative, near-production level environment to test and deploy code to a BigCommerce store. Users can create one or more replica sandbox stores without having to duplicate work into the production store.

The platform also boasts seamless Integration with existing teams, tools and workflows thanks to support of third-party platforms such as Github, Atlassian Jira and Microsoft. BigCommerce added it’s fully auditable with rollback capabilities.

“Enterprise merchants with complex implementations have a greater need for a true staging environment that is fast, collaborative and secure to meet the needs of developer teams to drive faster development-to-market cycles without risking the live production site,” said BigCommerce chief commercial officer, Russell Klein. “StagingPro is an enterprise-built solution that delivers the flexibility and scalability that is dedicated to empowering teams with the freedom to innovate and removes the ceiling from what’s possible.”

Frame AI raises US$7.6m

Another of our funding round stories this week is from Frame AI, which has raised US$7.6 million for its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven customer intelligence platform.

The latest investment round was oversubscribed and led by G20 Ventures with new participation from Velvet Sea, ValueStream, Twilio and LiveRamp. The new funding will be used to expand sales, and to deepen Frame’s capabilities in combining natural language and event data to better understand customer journeys.

Frame AI said the round follows an accelerating growth curve approaching three times year-on-year, driven by the vendor’s new product offering, Dynamic Cost Attribution. The platform combines budget information with AI analysis of support communication and lifecycle events to identify drivers of operational costs. The solution aims to give company leadership a more accurate, ‘always-on’ understanding of true life-time value.

“In this economic environment, companies are laser focused on operational efficiency, but customer support effort remains a black box of averages,” said Frame AI head of sales, Max Schultz. “Dynamic Cost Attribution allows leaders to attach a true dollar figure to the unique drivers of spend in their customer operations, while the rest of the Frame platform automates solutions to those inefficiencies.”

Along with the funding, Frame AI announced the appointment of a new chief commercial officer, David Honig, former SVP of Sales at Dynamic Signal (acquired by FirstUp).

Frame AI’s customer intelligence system uses AI to estimate costs and predict revenue outcomes associated with complex customer interactions. It does this by consolidating and enriching data across helpdesk, call centres, CRM and other channels.

Crownpeak finalises acquisition of Attraqt

Digital experience platform (DXP), Crownpeak, has finalised the acquisition of UK-based Attraqt, following regulatory approval.

Attraqt is a provider of SaaS solutions to facilitate product discovery experiences for brands and retailers globally. Attraqt does this through an omnichannel AI-powered product search, merchandising, and recommendation software to the ecommerce sector. Crownpeak said these capabilities will augment its composable digital experience product offerings.

The Attraqt acquisition follows Crownpeak’s October 2022 acquisition of ilumino, a digital accessibility services company.

“As we serve global leaders in B2C and B2B ecommerce, this acquisition broadens our business to add world-class shopper discovery experiences for consumers and businesses within Crownpeak’s enter-prise-grade DXP platform,” said Crownpeak CEO, Jonah Paransky. “This gives our customers stronger ecommerce tools to grow their revenues and operational capabilities. Crownpeak will continue scaling through additional strategic acquisitions to deliver critical, impactful tools for our global clients and partners.”

Local Measure strikes collaboration agreement with AWS

Local Measure has struck a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which includes mutual commitments for both companies to help customers use cloud technology to deliver improved contact centre experiences.

Building on an existing collaboration between Local Measure and AWS, the two companies will increase investment in go-to-market activities across several regions including North America, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Local Measure will expand its presence in these countries, and accelerate development of Engage, its contact centre platform. This is about further extending Amazon Connect by unifying customer communications, AI and machine learning into a single interface for agents. The Engage platform also leverages Amazon Connect to ensure customer inquiries are automatically routed to the agent best equipped to respond. In addition, all customer data is stored securely within the AWS Cloud environment of Local Measure’s clients, which include major brands across retail, media, finance and telco including Are Media and Coco Republic.

“The collaboration agreement will further empower customers to accelerate their adoption of intelligent, scalable cloud contact centre technologies, and omnichannel customer experience solutions,” Local Measure CEO and founder, Jonathan Barouch, said.

Local Measure will also establish a global Amazon Connect centre of excellence. Local Measure will train more than 30 employees on Amazon Connect, help them gain AWS Certifications, and set up Amazon Connect teams in countries where it operates. Local Measure and AWS will also collaborate on several sales and marketing initiatives to drive awareness for Engage, including workshops, webinars and customer technical support.

“Amazon Connect is one of the fastest growing services in the history of AWS, and working with Local Measure helps AWS further accelerate the pace of global cloud adoption in the contact centre industry alongside a trusted global partner,” AWS VP of worldwide channels and alliances at AWS, Ruba Borno, said. “We have watched Local Measure grow and witnessed firsthand their culture of working backwards from our customer’s needs, which aligns strongly to our leadership principles at AWS. We are looking forward to expanding our relationship and helping customers grow and transform their businesses.”

Chattermill secures US$26m

Another martech player benefitting from investment this week is Chatterbox. The vendor, which produces a platform to help with unlocking customer data insights, has secured US$26m in a series B round.

The latest funding round was led by Beringea, with participation from Runa Capital, DN Capital, Ventech, BTOV, SVB and Blossom Street Ventures. The six-year-old business will use the cash to double down geographic expansion plans, particularly in the US and UK.

Chattermill raised $8m in series A funding three years ago. Its platform aims to unify various customer data sets, such as customer support, CRM data, social, product, reviews and surveys, into one platform.

“Building a customer experience strategy for large businesses is incredibly difficult, and it really needs to be data-driven,” commented Chattermill CEO and co-founder, Mikhail Dubov. “Our goal is that by 2027 our AI is able to analyse over a billion pieces of customer feedback for our clients.”

Operative Intelligence gains $5m seed funding

Also raising funds this week is demand-as-a-service platform, operative Intelligence. The Australian-based startup has raised $5 million in seed funding to expand its team and scale its customer intelligence product capabilities.

Operative Intelligence is pitching its solutions at contact centres and business leaders who want customer analytics to support customer experience optimisations in their organisations tied to commercial revenue. The company was founded in 2019 by brothers, Peter and James Iansek.

The funding round was led by Bonfire Ventures with additional participation from Wonder Ventures.

“We’re proud to have bootstrapped the company from an idea to an end-to-end production stack, serving customers globally since day one,” says Peter Iansek. “This latest investment will allow us to accommodate our rapid growth projections and propel our journey to help thousands of organisations to unlock the true value of their customer service interactions, at scale.”

Amperity gives AWS Advertising and Marketing Initiative a tick of approval

Customer data platform (CDP) provider, Amperity, has thrown its support behind the AWS for Advertising and Marketing initiative from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help brands accelerate advertising and marketing transformation.

AWS for Advertising & Marketing is an initiative oriented around services and solutions for advertising agencies, marketers, publishers, ad technology providers and analytics service providers. The core focus is on delivering personalised ad experiences, optimising ad serving performance and cost and assisting with audience segmentation and attribution.

In a statement, Amperity said supporting the AWS for Advertising & Marketing initiative allows it to offer a secure, modern data stack for brands to better harness their first-party data.

“As third-party data signals and identity graphs continue to deteriorate and provide less value for brands, marketers must take a new approach to customer acquisition and retention, removing the reliance on third-party data solutions, and focusing on building high quality, omnichannel first-party data assets,” said Amperity CTO and co-founder, Derek Slager. “Through this initiative, Amperity can work with AWS to provide the critical components to deliver a secure, scalable way for brands to engage with customers and collaborate with one another without compromising privacy or compliance to build better customer experiences and business outcomes.”

 

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