Airtel Acquires Lemnisk Stake in Plan to Build Largest CDP
Bharti Airtel, a major telecommunications services provider from India, has acquired a strategic stake in fellow Indian company Lemnisk, a marketing automation firm, for a planned initiative to build what is being billed as the world’s largest customer data platform (CDP). Financial details of the transaction were not immediately available.
The planned CDP platform will cover Airtel’s various digital business concerns, including advertising technology from Airtel Ads, digital entertainment from Wynk Music and Airtel Xstream, and a digital marketplace from Airtel’s Thanks App. Airtel plans to offer the service through Airtel IQ, the company’s network-integrated Cloud Platform as a Service (CPaaS) product, for enterprises to create scalable omnichannel engagement for their customers.
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The Airtel initiative is being undertaken through its Start Up Accelerator Programme, which provides early-stage startup companies with opportunities to deploy technologies and applications on a massive scale—including more than 350 million retail customers and one million businesses—and to add strategic value to Airtel’s business offerings.
With close to 500 million subscriptions and operations in 18 countries across South Asia and Africa, Bharti Airtel is the world’s second largest mobile network operator after China Mobile Communications. Lemnisk offers an AI-driven marketing automation platform built on an intelligent CDP that is able to perform predictive segmentation and orchestrate personalization and cross-channel customer journeys at scale.
Finland’s Nosto Acquires Austrian firm Findologic
The e-commerce software and marketing firm from Finland known as Nosto has acquired Findologic, the AI-powered product discovery platform based in Austria. No financial details of the transaction are available, but the deal marks the third acquisition for Nosto in 18 months after it bought Lithuanian e-commerce search platform SearchNode last January and San Francisco-based social content marketing company Stackla in June 2021.
Nosto operates an AI-powered commerce experience platform (CXP) designed to help brands deliver personalized digital experiences, while Findologic is the developer of advanced search solutions aimed at creating dynamic shopping experiences for individual shoppers online.
Nosto executives say the acquisition will consolidate the standing of the merged entity in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, which together make up one of the largest e-commerce markets in Europe. The deal will also expand the combined footprint of both companies in Shopware, the German e-commerce and CX platform, as the already significant number of Findologic merchants with Shopware are added to Nosto’s own Shopware merchant roster.
Gladly Secures $55 Million Funding to Expand Customer Service Platform
Customer service platform provider Gladly has secured $55 million in funding from Riverwood Capital, a global investor in high-growth technology companies, to continue driving innovation of the Gladly platform toward more personalization. Additional participation in the funding round came from existing investors, a group that included Greylock, GGV, NEA, and Glynn Partners.
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The announcement comes on the heels of a memorable year for San Francisco-based Gladly, which reported 100% year-over-year growth in revenue and signed more than 100 new customers this year. The company also reported glowing results for its clients, who depend on the platform and its agents to provide service to their own customers. Since adopting the Gladly software, the company’s clients have reported a 10% increase in contact-center-generated revenue, a 20% bump in agent efficiency, and a 40% reduction in contact center tools, the figures supplied by Gladly show.
Gladly says its mission is to move customer service “beyond cases and tickets” to a more personalized form of service built around people. Its platform consolidates all customer requests into “one lifelong conversation stream” so that agents have immediate context when customers call. With such an approach, Gladly says it hopes the company can deliver exceptional customer service and cultivate customer loyalty, in turn translating into an improved bottom line for Gladly clients.
GetResponse Completes Acquisition of Recostream
GetResponse, the email marketing and marketing automation software company from Poland, announced the completion of its acquisition of fellow Polish firm Recostream, an AI-powered personalized recommendations technology company. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
By adding AI product recommendations powered by the Recostream technology, businesses using GetResponse can display personalized product and content recommendations to website visitors and grow their conversions. Analyzing each website visitor’s behavior, preferences, needs, and habits, the feature displays all recommendations in real time.
Founded in 1997, GetResponse enables businesses to run online marketing through its software, which is equipped with more than 30 tools for email marketing, marketing automation, website building, funnel conversion, live chat, webinar hosting, and more. Partnering with Recostream for the first time in 2021, GetResponse made the final decision in October 2022 to acquire Recostream. A technology spinoff of software company Stratoflow, Recostream is the developer of a personalized product recommendation engine that makes advanced AI and machine learning (ML) technology available to e-commerce sites of any size.
Dutch Technology Firm TheyDo Raises €12 Million
Amsterdam-based TheyDo, the provider of a journey management platform, recently raised €12 million in a Series A funding round that was led by Blossom Capital, the venture capital firm headquartered in London, with additional participation coming from 20VC and many other “notable angels,” according to an official statement.
The Dutch company says it intends to use the funds to build a team of designers and engineers to enhance its customer journey management platform, which brings all of a company’s data and insights about its customer journeys together in one place to help build better CX. And instead of separate teams working in silos, the TheyDo platform connects business teams and their respective roles within a customer’s journey into a single real-time dashboard.
Founded in 2019, TheyDo aims to help businesses align their goals with their customers’ needs. A key element of the company’s approach is to bring the correct metrics into play and to create deeper data and workflow integrations to gauge how solutions impact the CX across the board. The company will also use the new funds to invest in co-creation to bring community content directly into product, deploying technologies such as generative AI to help customers visualize journeys.
Author Information
Alex is responsible for writing about trends and changes that are impacting the customer experience market. He had served as Principal Editor at Village Intelligence, a Los Angeles-based consultancy on technology impacting healthcare and healthcare-related industries. Alex was also Associate Director for Content Management at Omdia and Informa Tech, where he produced white papers, executive summaries, market insights, blogs, and other key content assets. His areas of coverage spanned the sectors grouped under the technology vertical, including semiconductors, smart technologies, enterprise & IT, media, displays, mobile, power, healthcare, China research, industrial and IoT, automotive, and transformative technologies.
At IHS Markit, he was Managing Editor of the company’s flagship IHS Quarterly, covering aerospace & defense, economics & country risk, chemicals, oil & gas, and other IHS verticals. He was Principal Editor of analyst output at iSuppli Corp. and Managing Editor of Market Watch, a fortnightly newsletter highlighting significant analyst report findings for pitching to the media. He started his career in writing as an Editor-Reporter for The Associated Press.
