mParticle Acquires AI Startup Vidora

mParticle, the New York City-based provider of a customer data platform (CDP) for product and customer lifecycles, has acquired Vidora, an artificial intelligence (AI) personalization platform provider for customer data headquartered in San Francisco. Financial terms of the acquisition were not revealed, but the union will allow the creation and deployment of models across mParticle’s partner ecosystem of 300+ API integrations to improve decisioning, segmentation, and personalization.

This is mParticle’s second acquisition in the last seven months. Vidora is the provider of a real-time AI personalization platform, Cortex, that enables businesses to quickly integrate machine learning (ML) into their marketing, ad-tech, and product workflows. Cortex facilitates hundreds of use cases with a few clicks, including predictions, prescriptions like uplift modeling, recommendations, look-alikes, next-best-action, and dynamic decisioning.

With the integration of Vidora’s proprietary technology into mParticle, marketers will be able to create relevant, personalized experiences across any channel without needing data engineering expertise. Teams will also be able to enhance customer context with AI, creating rich attributes around predicted spend, churn risk, next-best-action, most likely next purchase, and more. These attributes are then made available and actionable in real-time to any of the 300+ partners in the mParticle ecosystem. 

“Teams need to do more with less, and we believe that begins by doing better with data,” says mParticle CEO Michael Katz. “By incorporating AI into the data layer, teams can improve the value they get out of their customer data, their data pipelines, and their customer engagement toolset. The end result is unmatched performance without sacrificing scale.”

Aisera Secures $90 Million from Goldman Sachs and Thoma Bravo

Aisera, the Palo Alto, California-based provider of an AI-driven service experience platform for automated CX and employee experiences (EX), recently secured $90 million in Series D funding. The round was led by the growth equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management and by Thoma Bravo, including participation from leading investors True Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Icon Ventures, World Innovation Lab (WIL), Zoom Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Maynard Webb (Webb Investment Network), Ram Shriram (Sherpalo Ventures), and Silicon Valley Bank.

The new funding, which will be used to accelerate the company’s market expansion across industry verticals and fuel its global growth and go-to-market strategy, comes at a time of unprecedented growth for Aisera, which has expanded its customer base to more than 75 million users.

Aisera uses both unsupervised natural language understanding (NLU) and AI knowledge graph-based conversational AI and automation solutions. Propelled by AI and machine learning, the Aisera platform auto-resolves tasks, actions, and workflows for IT, human resources, customer service, sales, and operations, while integrating easily with enterprise applications like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, Workday, Adobe, Atlassian, and BMC.

“AI has become necessary to support employees in today’s highly inflationary, work-from-anywhere environment,” says Muddu Sudhakar, founder and CEO of Aisera. “With the injection of growth capital from Goldman Sachs and Thoma Bravo, Aisera will be the invisible hand of innovation that enables all users—across all lines of business and industries—to get the support experiences they’ve come to expect without human latency, error, or disruption.”

India’s CleverTap Raises $105 Million in Fresh Funding

Customer engagement and retention platform CleverTap recently raised $105 million in Series D financing, the latest entry in a series of startups founded in India that have been making fast inroads into the global software-as-a-service (SaaS) market.

The new round of funding was led by Canadian investment management firm Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec (CDPQ), with participation from Mumbai, India’s IIFL AMC’s Tech Fund, New York City-based Tiger Global Management, Sequoia India, and Tokyo-headquartered Recruit Holdings. The new round now values CleverTap at approximately $775 million, up from $385 million in 2019.

CleverTap operates cloud-based customer management and engagement tracking tools, sifting through data points in apps to offer contextual and personalized recommendations to clients, who also use the platform to run campaigns to test new features and offerings. More than 1,200 customers in 60 countries use CleverTap to power in excess of 10,000 apps, according to the India-based startup.

Baltic Firm RAIT Acquires Majority Stake in Synopticom

RAIT, the largest independent research company in Europe’s Baltic states, has acquired a 51% stake in CX research technology firm Synopticom, the provider of a CX platform based in Lithuania that also offers market research and experience management expertise.

RAIT says its latest deal will enrich the firm’s portfolio while also helping Synopticom expand into new countries and markets. The Synopticom CX platform helps companies build and revise customer journeys, integrate CX with business data, and optimize business results.

The acquisition builds on RAIT’s 2021 takeover of Sweden’s Fürst Scandinavian Research, a specialist in traditional research projects, online panel studies, and mystery shopping. In 2017, Rait acquired the custom research operations of GfK, the German provider of data and intelligence to the consumer goods industry, excluding GfK’s retail and technology arm.

Based in Vilnius, Lithuania, RAIT also has offices in Estonia, Latvia, and Sweden.

Sverica Makes Growth Investment in Omeda

Sverica Capital Management, the San Francisco-based private equity investment firm that has raised more than $1.1 billion across five funds, has made a strategic growth investment in Omeda, the Chicago-headquartered provider of a marketing platform for organizations to monetize their first-party data.

With deep vertical expertise in media and information services and a fully integrated, all-in-one subscription management, Omeda helps build multichannel experiences using a single-stack solution that allows organizations full access and activation of their first-party data in one holistic platform. Omeda’s clients use the platform to segment, target, and engage customers through preferred marketing channels, supported by compliant data governance and intuitive workflows.

“First-party audience data is the lifeblood of media companies and associations, and hundreds of these groups have trusted Omeda to manage, amplify, and monetize this data. With content volumes exploding, we believe many more organizations will recognize their role as publishers and the unique power of Omeda’s platform to engage their audiences,” says Ryan Harstad, a partner at Sverica.

Aaron Oberman, CEO of Omeda, says partnering with Sverica will allow the company to accelerate investments in its products, growth and client experience.

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