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ON24, which provides webinar and virtual event experiences, debuted publicly this week and is valued at nearly $3 billion as of Friday. Shares for the digital experience software platform jumped to 54% after opening on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday and has raised nearly $430 million. It has traded as high as $81.98 per share.
The company is naturally benefiting from the rise in virtual events in webinar as the world shuttered because of COVID-19 and sent businesses into a global digital pivot for how they run physical events. Marketers have turned more than ever to webinar software platforms for producing lead-generating webinars. Event planners need software to support live and recorded virtual events, which, one year after the pandemic shutdowns, is still where the industry stands and likely will, well into 2021.
ON24 recorded revenue of $103.7 million for the first nine months of 2020, up from $65.2 million in the same period a year prior (59% growth). The company in 2018 made $82.6 million and $89.1 million in all of 2019 (7.8% growth).
In other customer experience and digital marketing software news …
HubSpot Signs Agreement To Acquire The Hustle
HubSpot, a customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing software platform, announced this week it has signed an agreement to acquire The Hustle, a media company that produces a newsletter, podcast and research content. HubSpot officials said they’ll be able to extend their ability to offer valuable content across a broader range of topics and a more diverse set of media.
HubSpot is well known for its blog, certification program and industry takes on a variety of topics. The Hustle offerings will help it deliver more educational, business and tech-trend content across different formats. HubSpot officials said seven million people each month read the company’s blogs and hundreds of thousands view HubSpot videos on YouTube.
The Hustle’s daily email was started in 2016 and includes 1.5 million readers. The Hustle’s subscription platform, Trends, and podcast, My First Million, give entrepreneurs insights, data, and best practices.
Tealium Raises $96 Million in Series G Funding
Tealium, a Customer Data Platform (CDP), has announced it raised $96 million in Series G funding led by existing investors Georgian and Silver Lake Waterman. The funding, which increases the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion, will be used to fund accelerated product innovation. Tealium officials bill their software as a vendor-neutral CDP and reported more than 1,300 solution integrations. The Tealium Customer Data Hub encompasses tag management, an API hub, a customer data platform with machine learning and data management solutions.
Customer Data Platform Industry To Reach $1.5 Billion in 2021
Speaking of the CDP industry ….
The CDP Institute released a report this week that finds the industry will reach at least $1.55 billion this year, up from $1.3 billion last year. CDPs are increasingly embedded inside of larger systems, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. The semi-annual report also found that 10 of the 13 vendors entering the industry in the second half of 2020 provide campaign management or message delivery services in addition to the core CDP function of creating unified customer profiles. Those firms account for 70% of the 133 CDP vendors identified in the report and 71% of industry employment.
Despite this trend, there is also strong demand for CDPs that provide only data management and analytics, researchers found, representing the fastest growth of all CDPs types during the report period.
Dynamic Yield Expands Multilingual Support for Global Personalization
Dynamic Yield, an experience optimization platform owned by McDonald’s, has announced the expansion of its Multilingual Support with the launch of Multilanguage Campaigns. This is designed to allow global brands to tailor experiences according to different site languages. They company already supports multiple currencies for conversion events and has offerings that can render localized product recommendations based on page context and product feed values.
Marketers will be able to localize content and manage translations for each element of a variation or template (including text, image, color, or any other variable) within the campaign according to each desired locale, according to company officials. This can be done without writing additional JavaScript code, they claim.
Observe.AI and Microsoft Team Up in Contact Center AI
Observe.AI, which provides a Contact Center AI, has announced it will work with Microsoft to bring automation and AI to enhance customer experiences, improve compliance and boost agent performance. Enterprise customers can purchase Observe.AI’s Contact Center AI solution today on Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace and on AppSource.
Observe.AI analyzes contact center voice and chat interactions, extracts sentiment insights and automates evaluation workflows. Observe.AI and Microsoft will help enterprises apply AI to use cases like customer support, sales, compliance and workforce optimization. Observe.AI is part of the Microsoft for Startups program and leverages Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning services to train its deep learning AI models. It can import data into data visualization tools, such as Microsoft Power BI.
Verint Completes Spinoff of Cognyte Software
Verint Systems, a customer engagement company, has announced that it has completed the spin-off of Cognyte Software. It now begins as a pure-play customer engagement vendor with an exclusive focus and extensive resources. Cognyte began trading on NASDAQ on Feb. 2 under the symbol “CGNT”.
The Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform — built on a native cloud architecture with an open design — is designed to enable brands to connect work, data and experiences across the organization.
Verint helps organizations break down barriers and eliminate the constraints of organizational and data silos to achieve boundless customer engagement with its open cloud platform, domain expertise and broad partner ecosystem, according to Verint CEO Dan Bodner.
Brightloom Unveils Customer Growth Platform
Brightloom has unveiled its Customer Growth Platform (CGP), a customer engagement solution built around customer transaction data and powered by measurement and predictive modeling. The platform offers an SaaS approach to automated AI-driven, predictive personalization. Brightloom makes marketing programs available and actionable for retailers, restaurants and consumer brands of all sizes, according to company officials.
Brightloom also raised $15 million from new and existing investors including Valor Siren Ventures and Tao Capital Partners to accelerate R&D and scale its operations.
The Brightloom CGP includes proprietary product recommendation and revenue forecast models, integrations with over 30 different data platforms and marketing systems, ability to measure campaign effectiveness by comparing results across treatment and control groups and provides brands with an up-to-date view of campaign impact on key metrics including revenue, transaction frequency, and order value per transaction and per customer.
Data Axle Releases Lead Gen Tool
Data Axle has announced a new lead-generation offering to help B2B marketers increase sales effectiveness. Data Axle, formerly known as Infogroup, will power its new service with its business data. With its B2B lead gen offering, Data Axle uses its business database, its multi-sourced intent data, and its B2C Link dataset which connects a prospect’s business and consumer attributes into a single targetable profile. Via its integrations, Data Axle can deliver leads into any company’s CRM platform.
Zendesk Unveils New Suite With Messaging Solution
Zendesk, a customer service software company with support and sales products, this week has announced the general availability of its messaging solution as part of the new Zendesk Suite. The new package brings together all Zendesk’s service capabilities, including messaging, into one offering.
Zendesk’s messaging tools are designed to give businesses the ability to have continuous and personalized conversations whether customers want to text, chat on their computer, reach out over WhatsApp, and more. Companies can now provide connected conversational experiences across web mobile, and social channels that work with built-in automation. Zendesk’s messaging solution also offers advanced capabilities including proactive notifications, enabling specialized third-party bots, and allowing customers to transact directly within the conversation when browsing products, reserving seats or making payments.
Contentstack Debuts New User Experience
Contentstack, a Content Experience Platform (CXP), has announced a redesigned user interface for its headless content management system (CMS). The new design system brings a simplified user experience to both editors and developers, according to company officials. The new UI is a game changer for enterprise software, bringing simplicity and elegance to content management. The redesign is focused on productivity with a streamlined editing experience and more space for content, fewer clicks in the editorial process and faster discovery of content, officials promised.