All the latest martech, adtech and customer tech news from Lily AI, Teradata, Neustar, Marketplacer, Yotpo, Atomic.io, Lumos, Evorra, HubSpot and Infobip
Lily AI closes US$25m funding round
Product attribution platform vendor, Lily AI, has closed a US$25 million Series B financing round, money earmarked for extending its solution within the retail stack.
Lily AI is a product attributes platform that injects a customer-centred product taxonomy across an existing retail tech ecosystem to help drive better conversion, personalised product discovery and demand forecasting. It does this by using artificial intelligence (AI)-powered image recognition, which extracts more than 15,000 product attributes. The company’s client list includes Bloomingdale's, The Gap, Macy’s and thredUP.
The latest investment round included participation from Canaan Partners, Conductive Ventures, Sorenson Ventures and NEA. Lily AI said it will use the new funding to further expand into mid-market retail ecommerce brands across home, beauty and fashion and build out capabilities of its platform. The company has recently bolstered its international footprint by launching in the UK and Europe.
“Retailers that invest in understanding how to accurately connect their shoppers with the relevant products they're looking to buy set themselves up for increased conversion, larger order sizes, and a future in which those shoppers return to their e-commerce sites time and again,” said Lily AI co-founder and CEO, Purva Gupta. “That's why we founded Lily AI, and the reason we have seen exponential growth within the retail industry. I am excited that our investors see, as our customers do, that providing a customer-centred language for the entire retail stack is now a foundational, core layer to power modern retail.”
Neustar and InfoSum partner up on privacy-first advertising
Neustar, a TransUnion company, has debuted its suite of identity resolution and data capabilities, Neustar Unified Identity, in InfoSum’s Data Clean Room.
The multi-party identity management and data collaboration solution aims to help companies undertake privacy-enhanced audience creation and data enrichment and is pitched at brands, agencies and publishers. The partnership between Neustar and InfoSum means clients can connect and share offline and online customer data in a secure clean room to augment their audience segmentation and omnichannel targeting initiatives.
Additionally, InfoSum clients will get access to Neustar’s identity resolution and data enrichment capabilities. The two companies said their partnership enables seamless analysis and prediction of shared demographics, behavioural attributes and consumer psychographics across first-party datasets from multiple advertising partners and data providers.
“With InfoSum, we’re helping prepare the marketing world for the transformative changes happening in customer data and B2C marketing,” said Neustar EVP, marketing solutions, Michael Schoen. “This partnership reflects our strategic focus on consumer trust and the privacy-enhanced technologies and identity resolution capabilities that make delivering relevant and valuable customer experiences possible.”
Read more: Why second-party data is crucial to marketers
Marketplacer boosts customer reviews functionality with Yotpo partnership
Also partnering up this week are marketplace platform provider, Marketplacer, and customer reviews, loyalty and SMS marketing vendor, Yotpo.
The collaboration between the two companies will now enable Marketplacer to provide functionality managing customer reviews, user-generated content, rewards and referrals. Prior to this partnership, Marketplacer’s customers were unable to gauge sentiment on their products and were increasingly demanding robust options to collect product-level reviews.
Yotpo’s analytics dashboard also enables merchants on Marketplacer to obtain a solid overview of how their products are received by shoppers. In turn, Yotpo gets extended reach into the marketplace economy through the collaboration.
“This is a game changer for Australian ecommerce marketplaces, even though it seems like a no-brainer feature,” claimed Yotpo head of partnerships, Rad Mitic. “The complexities of gathering product-specific reviews on marketplaces make it near-impossible to offer shoppers accurate social proof - even with an amazing engineering team.”
“We partnered with Yotpo for several reasons, including market leadership, focus on innovation and ability to disrupt the future of marketplace functionality in the critical areas of social proof, online reputation and support for sales conversion,” added Marketplace chief alliance officer, John Mullins.
“At the same time, this partnership enables both of our organisations to further diversify and broaden our sales channels while providing Marketplacer customers such as SurfStich, Providoor and Barbeques Galore with the ability to collect product specific reviews.”
Atomic.io expands to Australia
Customer messaging platform, Atomic.io, is officially expanding into Australia after securing US$4.5 million in Series A funding.
Atomic.io is a New Zealand-based startup that has built a low-code customer experience messaging platform for enterprise apps. The aim is to unlock latent value from enterprise apps, delivering rapid results for customers in messaging channels. The business was founded by former COO of Xero and CIO of Air New Zealand, Alastair Grigg, and ex-Bank of New Zealand head of online sales, Ben Pujii.
The Series A funding round was led by Movac, with participation from director and existing shareholder and former Xero chief, Rod Drury, K1W1, Hoku. Startup investors also joining in included Xero co-founder, Hamish Edwards, and former Xero executives, Paula Jackson, Alistair Grigg, Paul Williams, and Ben Styles.
Customers on-board so far include Foodstuffs North Island, Kiwibank, BNZ, Kiwi Wealth, Southern Cross and Figured. Following early US market activity, Atomic also signed health technology provider, SS&C Health.
“The future of customer experience is proactive and personalised. Apps should work for you and let you know what you need to do next and give clear options. Atomic.io provides a platform for app developers to deliver those experiences,” Drury said. “With a scarcity of mobile developers I love that Atomic allows business analysts and product managers to deliver measurable mobile experiences quickly across iOS, Android and Web.
“With this funding from Movac and our other investors in place we’re excited to build the Atomic team to service this exciting opportunity.”
Aussie martech startup secures $800,000 in pre-seed funding
Also securing cash this week is homegrown martech startup, Lumos. The company has raised $800,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round from angels and growth equity firms to build out its tech for the ad industry.
Founded in 2020 in stealth mode and launching an MVP in early 2022, Lumos’ ambition is to disrupt and democratise the $40 billion global out-of-home and digital retargeting ad market by tapping into the gig economy. Its solution provides advertisers with access to a network of gig economy riders using IoT-enabled smart bags. The company is also building up a proprietary Lumos data engine to support OOH retargeting and provide audience analytics.
Lumos is back by Claremont Capital, Dorcas Capital and notable angels including founding partner of Imprint Capital Partners, Curt Shi, Beames Capital partner, Hugo de Jong, Metagrove Ventures managing partner, Barry Winata, and Trampoline Syndicate led by Matt Perkes and Abraham Robertson along with senior bankers, private equity and consulting firm executives.
Lumos said it will be using the pre-seed funds to scale its footprint across Australia, further develop advanced data-driven ad reporting capabilities and roll out more IoT-enabled ad solutions to deliver scalable and targeted physical and digital ads for businesses across multiple cities.
“We are so pleased by the overwhelming support that we've received from our investors,” Lumos CEO and co-founder, Eric Fan, said. He claimed the company is already working with more than 20 domestic and international brands and agencies of different sizes.
“Lumos was born while we were still in the thick of an economic downturn and businesses were pushed to reimagine the possibilities of innovative and disruptive technologies like ours to stand out more. The great investor backing we’ve received is a true testament to the global market opportunity for our innovative martech platform in Australia and beyond.”
Evorra secures US$1 for responsible data marketing play
Another player securing pre-seed funding this week is Evorra, a SaaS marketplace founded out of the UK offering a solution for building and monestising addressable, first-party audiences.
Evorra leverages data clean room technology to help brands and agencies establish and monetise addressable audience sets through a privacy conscious architecture. Users can licence, build and enable bespoke audiences across media channels using existing workflows and via an online user interface. Evorra said its vision is to democratise addressable audiences at scale for non-technical marketing professionals, without letting go of privacy.
The latest US$1m in pre-seed investment was led by York IE, adding to previous investment from Akama Holding and Vivium based in the Middle East and additional investment by FirstPartyCapital and Australian VC fund, Shearwater Capital. Evorra said its investor footprint reflects both its global ambitions and the global opportunity the solution represents.
Evorra is now looking to extend operations across the US, Asia and Europe and will use the new capital to improve user-friendliness of its SaaS data marketplace to fit into the workflow requirements of agencies and brands.
“The global interest in Evorra is growing every day because we bring together both ease of use and the ability to activate privacy compliant audiences at scale without a costly and expensive technology burden,” Evorra founder and CEO, Aaron Ritoper, said. “Evorra has developed with regular input from a community of brands who believe in the power of a post-cookie, decentralised data service, and are motivated by the opportunity to solve complex ad tech problems with uncompromising simplicity.”
Teradata debuts cloud native VantageCloud Lake
Teradata has taken the wrappers off VantageCloud Lake, a new cloud analytics and data platform based on fresh cloud-native architecture.
VantageCloud Lake brings the vendor’s Teradata Vantage solution, now called VantageCloud Enterprise, into a cloud-first offering designed to be automatically elastic by leveraging low-cost object store at its core. The aim is also to be easy to use and scale - or stop. Two editions are available, both coming with the vendor’s workload management tools, financial governance and data fabric functionality.
Teradata said the new offering should appeal to an expanded set of customers and workloads beyond the traditional IT department because it’s a self-service offering. It’s also designed to rapidly accelerate business outcomes for a broad stretch of use cases including smaller ad hoc, exploratory and departmental workloads. It does this by making it easier to spin up adhoc, exploratory and departmental workloads leveraging open, connected data. Teradata also now supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Amazon S3.
Key features include policy-driven scaling, allowing organisations to place guardrails on specific workloads to facilitate budget management. This is supported by financial reporting across each workload. Compute instances can be dynamically and automatically added, increased or reduced to meet changes in demand, and open data sharing is possible through low-cost object storage.
“Teradata VantageCloud Lake is the result of a multi-year journey to create a new paradigm for data and analytics – one where superior performance, agility and value all go hand-in-hand,” said Teradata chief product officer, Hillary Ashton. “With Teradata VantageCloud Lake, we now support all analytic workload needs at every level in the organisation, enabling companies to be more nimble, experimental and innovative in an easy-to-use solution without losing the governance and cost visibility that Teradata is known for.”
Infobip builds an integration for HubSpot
Cloud communications platform provider, Infobip, has built an integration with HubSpot to provide WhatsApp and SMS messaging for the latter’s clients.
The integration, available in HubSpot's App Marketplace, enables its clients to connect with customers using their preferred communication channel. It does this by syncing Infobip's WhatsApp and SMS channels with HubSpot, allowing businesses to send automated messages and updates to deliver faster and more efficient communication. Businesses can also automate payment links sharing and generate automated support messages, as well as provide verification and authentication codes to customers during login via WhatsApp or SMS.
Infobip said the integration is part of its strategy to deliver a communication platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) offering.
“Our clients want to be able to interact with their customers on the right channel at the right time. With the Infobip integration, our customers now have access to market-leading customer communications over WhatsApp and SMS, helping them to enhance engagement, increase loyalty and ultimately drive sales,” Hubspot VP of platform ecosystem, Scott Brinker, said.
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