Valued at $400M, MotherDuck removes the waitlist from its platform, announces new product features, and adds 11 more partners to its growing ecosystem

MotherDuck, builder of a serverless, easy to use data analytics platform based on open source database DuckDB, today announced a $52.5 million round of funding. Led by Felicis, the round puts MotherDuck at a $400M post-money valuation and brings their total funding to date to $100M. New and existing investors like a16z, Madrona, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, Redpoint, Zero Prime, and more participated in the round as well. Felicis General Partner Viviana Faga will join MotherDuck's Board of Directors.

As part of today's announcement, MotherDuck will no longer have a waitlist for those interested in trying the platform. Anyone who wants to start leveraging the power of DuckDB at scale immediately can sign up at motherduck.com. The company also announced feedback-driven improvements to the analyst experience including faster data import, a better notebook interface with SQL auto-complete, optimized hybrid query planning, and improved database sharing.

"We're proud of what we've been able to achieve over the last year alongside the DuckDB community and the DuckDB Labs team," said Jordan Tigani, CEO and Co-Founder of MotherDuck. "Our initial funding allowed us to grow our engineering team to get our platform launched and in use by almost 2,000 analysts. With this funding and the momentum surrounding our platform and DuckDB's adoption, the sky's the limit. The key is a simplified scale-up approach to SQL analytics; for the 95% of us who do not have petabyte-scale data, a scale-up approach to analytics based on an engine like DuckDB can be faster, cheaper and more user-friendly than distributed architectures. Spending the last week in Amsterdam with the DuckDB team has solidified that DuckDB is the future. We're excited about bringing the power of its simplicity to organizations at scale and improving the analyst experience across the board."

As the popularity of DuckDB skyrockets across the data community - thanks to its ability to run everywhere (including in the browser), query data from anywhere without preloading it, and its super-fast execution of analytical queries - early adoption of MotherDuck has validated the belief that data technology needs to focus on analyst experience. As the DuckDB team continues to rapidly evolve the open source database engine and its close ties to cutting-edge academic research, MotherDuck has been able to add collaboration and scalability of the cloud for organizations who want to use DuckDB at a larger scale.

The partnership between the two teams has led to more than 2,000 users already finding success with MotherDuck across a multitude of use cases to include: 

• A cloud data warehouse for the rest of us: MotherDuck provides a simplified, performant and efficient data warehouse based on the lightweight DuckDB engine for the majority of data warehouses that don't need petabyte scale. 
• A data lake query engine: MotherDuck uses DuckDB to query your data where it sits as parquet, iceberg, or CSV files.
• A serverless backend for data apps: Customers of SaaS applications like SaaSWorks and Dexibit need fast and fresh analytics on their data to make better decisions. Developers often tackle this with analytics queries running on the transactional database, which are not designed for the task. MotherDuck uses DuckDB to provide a better solution.

"We looked at various OLAP platforms that could serve our broad and demanding data platform that serves the modern CFO as we were hitting scale limits (price and performance) with Postgres on RDS. MotherDuck with DuckDB was by far the fastest - both in the cloud and run on our developer's machines - bridging price and performance and greatly increasing productivity. We feel we have partnered with the future of Cloud and desktop-based OLAP providers with MotherDuck." - Jim O'Neill, CTO & Co-Founder, SaaSWorks.

MotherDuck's ecosystem also continues to grow. Following their initial product launch in June, the company announced 16 integrations with the platform. Today, MotherDuck is announcing 11 more: Cube, dltHub, Evidence, GoodData, Kestra, Metabase, InfinyOn, LlamaIndex, Sling, Streamlit, and Voltron Data. Airbyte will be available to users today, while integrations with Fivetran and Tableau are both underway.

"We are excited to partner with Jordan and the MotherDuck team as they build a platform designed to seamlessly blend speed and user-friendliness, thereby simplifying and making analytics widely accessible. Analysts clearly need the speed of working with data at the edge, as well as the flexibility to query cloud-based data. The era of serverless data analytics is here." - Viviana Faga, General Partner, Felicis. 

Built on Geo-Behavioral Consumer Data, Integration with LiveRamp Allows Marketers to Harness the Power of Visitation-Based Audience Intelligence for Targeted Advertising

DriveLine, a cutting-edge audience intelligence solution, announces the availability of its custom audience segments on LiveRamp's partner network, named Google Cloud's "Global Industry Tech Partner of the Year".

By leveraging LiveRamp's data connectivity and identity resolution capabilities, LiveRamp's active user base can now access, target and reach the DriveLine custom visitation audiences relevant to their mobile advertising campaign KPIs.

"DriveLine's integration with LiveRamp represents a significant milestone in our journey to deliver highly targeted custom audiences from high impact audience intelligence," says Peter Sayer, CEO of DriveLine. "Audiences built on movement, or visitation, serve as a gateway to forging meaningful connections with consumers, shifting from engagement to conversion driven strategy."

Powered by precise location-intelligence, DriveLine leverages the spatial context of their consumers, including their physical movements and interactions with specific locations. LiveRamp allows brands and agencies that leverage programmatic platforms an easy way to access the most targeted audiences for high-impact advertising helping marketers create, target and reach relevant custom audiences across 250 million mobile devices.

Analytic Partners helps brands evolve from Marketing Mix Modeling and Multi-Touch Attribution report card ROIs to future-looking commercial intelligence for business growth.

Analytic Partners, the leader in marketing measurement and optimization, has added new capabilities to its platform, GPS-Enterprise (GPS-E) to empower businesses to make dynamic, forward-looking decisions with confidence. GPS-E delivers commercial intelligence to enable brands to move away from backward-looking report card measurement and account for the rapid shifts in the market and overall economy.

In today's increasingly complex business landscape, marketers can no longer rely on the historical performance ROI report cards from Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) to plan future activities. What worked last quarter might not work next quarter due to rapid changes in the economic environment, customer behavior, and competitive landscape. Recognizing the need for forward-looking planning and strategies, Analytic Partners' Commercial Analytics solution and platform, GPS-E, empower marketers to make proactive decisions that boost their brands.

Commercial Analytics leverages advanced science and proven expertise to understand and predict the impact of all business drivers, including brand, customer, product, operational, market and external factors. GPS-E integrates data, analytics, and insights, and facilitates decisioning through dynamic forecasting and real-world scenario planning and optimization.

New features now available with Commercial Analytics on Analytic Partners' platform, GPS-Enterprise:

• Proactive planning – automatically generates investment scenarios that incorporate all internal constraints and outside influences to surface new and untapped opportunities to create value.
• Scenario guidance – reduces time-to-decision by enabling brands to develop, optimize and evaluate multi-objective plans at an accelerated pace.
• Forecast collaboration – allows brands to continuously anticipate and react to change and share updated insights across functions and teams. Brands can easily adapt and pivot to changing market conditions, adjust assumptions and optimize to deliver more accurate forecasts.
• New end-to-end UI/UX – surface timely insights on what's happening behind the scenes and shed light into the perceived black box. The transparency on data accuracy, analytics and timeliness of intelligence builds credibility in planning and decision-making.

Analytic Partners has over 20 years of expertise delivering marketing measurement and optimization insights, validating models and analytic techniques, and addressing multi-faceted business questions and goals. Customers leveraging Analytic Partners' Commercial Analytics for decision-making, have earned industry recognition on various occasions, including winning at the ANA Genius Awards for Analytics Adoption multiple years in a row, the Broadbent Prize for Best Dedication to Effectiveness at the IPA Effectiveness Awards, and the I-COM Data Creativity Awards. The new capabilities are built upon the proven success of turning data into expertise so that brands can unlock growth opportunities and deliver commercial value.

Nancy Smith, President and CEO at Analytic Partners, explains: "We are pleased to release these powerful, forward-looking enhancements to our platform, GPS-E. The accelerating pace of change continues in the marketplace. Due to our close working relationship with our valued customers, we have an acute understanding of the need for proactive and accessible planning and optimization capabilities. The early results are in, and our customers are now better equipped with the tools commercial decisions and adapt to dynamic market challenges and opportunities."

Bloomreach, the platform fueling limitless e-commerce experiences, today announced Bloomreach Discovery is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace. An e-commerce search solution with fast ROI, Bloomreach Discovery leverages a rich commerce dataset and smart AI to help businesses power more personalized customer experiences — all while reducing manual workloads for merchandisers and business users. Its inclusion on the Google Cloud Marketplace will offer seamless integration with technology stacks built on Google Cloud, allowing more businesses around the world to recognize the fast benefits of AI-powered e-commerce search.

Google Cloud Marketplace integrates top solutions with Google Cloud to easily scale and simplify any digital transformation. By accelerating the procurement process for teams, it makes it easier for customers to discover and deploy new solutions. Now, businesses seeking to optimize their e-commerce experience with powerful search and merchandising tools can do just that, using the marketplace to quickly find and integrate Bloomreach Discovery into their existing technology ecosystem. And with a growing number of generative AI and large learning model (LLM) powered features, Bloomreach Discovery will not only enable businesses to drive better product discovery today — it will empower them with new ways to drive relevancy and efficiency in a future shaped by rapidly evolving customer expectations.

“We are thrilled to add Bloomreach Discovery to the Google Cloud Marketplace. With Bloomreach Engagement already available on the marketplace, we’ve been able to see the success of customers adding our solutions to their Google Cloud tech stack. We’re excited to grow opportunities for that success as we now make Discovery even more accessible for businesses,” said Anand Subbiah, Vice President, Technical Alliances & Ecosystem Platform, Bloomreach.

“As a part of their digital transformation strategies, many enterprises are seeking solutions that help them better engage with consumers along their purchasing journey,” says Dai Vu, Managing Director, Cloud Marketplace & ISV GTM Programs, Google Cloud. “Now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, Bloomreach Discovery is enabling revenue-generating teams to create endless new paths to purchase, greater profitability, and fast business growth.”

Bloomreach Engagement, the company’s marketing automation solution, became available on the Google Cloud Marketplace in July 2021, making it easier for marketers to unify data from all customer touchpoints and deploy data-driven campaigns. Visit the company’s website to learn more about how businesses can drive success with Google Cloud and Bloomreach.

Available in the Now Platform Vancouver release, Now Assist integrates generative AI to accelerate productivity, improve experiences, and increase agility

New features in Now Assist are powered by a domain-specific ServiceNow LLM, built for the enterprise and optimized for accuracy and data privacy

ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, today announced a major Now Platform expansion with the Now Assist family of solutions. Available in the Now Platform Vancouver release, Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM), Customer Service Management (CSM), HR Service Delivery (HRSD), and Creator embed the power of generative AI across all workflows on the Now Platform to help accelerate productivity, improve experiences, and increase agility for customers. To power new features within Now Assist, we are releasing a domain-specific ServiceNow large language model (Now LLM), built for the enterprise and optimized for productivity and data privacy.

“Organizations are seeking a trusted partner to help them navigate this dynamic and fast-moving era of intelligence,” said CJ Desai, president and chief operating officer, ServiceNow. “ServiceNow has thousands of customers already using the Now Platform to digitize and streamline processes across the enterprise. With our Vancouver release, we’re combining the power of the Now Platform with new generative AI features to bring AI-driven intelligence to every corner of the business, creating a catalyst for productivity and better enterprise experiences.”

Delivering enterprise-grade generative AI across every workflow

According to Goldman Sachs, generative AI will lift human productivity, adding almost $7 trillion to global GDP in the next decade¹. The Now Platform operationalizes generative AI to drive growth and help reduce costs for every customer across every business function with enterprise-grade AI designed for high levels of digital trust and privacy. Now Assist is woven into all processes and workflows to help optimize performance and is compliant with ServiceNow controls for ethical and responsible development and use.

Now Assist incorporates generative AI features such as case, incident, and agent chat summarization, virtual agent, and search capabilities that can be applied to a broad range of scenarios and functions, so every persona from employees to agents to developers can harness the power of generative AI. This foundational approach allows enterprises to bring the power of generative AI to any department and expand to other parts of the business quickly and easily.

• Now Assist for ITSM empowers enterprise IT leaders to take control of their IT experience, dramatically improving agent productivity and the employee experience with faster resolutions. Summaries of incident history and live Virtual Agent interactions deliver complete answers instead of search results so agents can resolve issues and requests faster without needing to ask users to repeat themselves. Now Assist for ITSM can also create contextual summaries of incidents and resolution notes, which help organizations implement incident management best practices and resolve more incidents in less time.
• Now Assist for CSM streamlines the customer service process from beginning to end, leading to higher agent productivity, potential cost savings, and improved customer experience. By rapidly generating summaries for cases and chats, Now Assist for CSM reduces manual work and allows agents to resolve customer issues faster. Customers also benefit from an improved self-service experience, with access to resources that help them find answers fast, leading to higher case deflection and cost reduction.
• Now Assist for HRSD helps HR leaders drive productivity and operational efficiency, reduces redundant, manual tasks for HR teams, and gets employees the answers they need quickly with little disruption to their day. HR managers can handle issues from payroll discrepancies to paperwork changes without needing to sift through loads of information by reviewing instant summaries of case topics, previous history from live chat and Virtual Agent interactions, as well as previous resolutions and actions taken. This gives HR teams the context they need to solve problems quickly and confidently.
• Now Assist for Creator helps development teams create and scale apps more quickly on the Now Platform. Trained on code from ServiceNow engineering, results are designed to be higher quality and more scalable, and the data processed on the platform is more secure than with any other code generation technology. Now Assist for Creator includes the general availability of text-to-code, which converts natural language text into high‑quality code suggestions, and in some cases complete code. Text‑to‑code helps ensure every corner of the enterprise can create seamless coding experiences that can deliver fast development and increased productivity.

AI embedded in the DNA of the Now Platform

ServiceNow’s generative AI strategy provides customers with broad and secure LLM support, through either general purpose LLMs or ServiceNow-developed models. General-purpose LLMs provide customer flexibility and currently include access to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service LLM and OpenAI API. Built into the Now platform, domain-specific LLMs are designed specifically for ServiceNow’s workflows, use cases, and processes, and are tailored to agents, employees, customers, and IT administrators who use ServiceNow. This allows for an excellent end-user experience, unprecedented time-to-market, and high levels of transparency and governance.

For example, features within Now Assist for Search are powered by a ServiceNow fine-tuned LLM based on the NVIDIA NeMo framework and served using NVIDIA Triton Inference Server software, both part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform. These features bring to market new capabilities built from the ServiceNow and NVIDIA partnership announced in May.

What customers are saying about the Now Platform Vancouver release

Deloitte

“Deloitte’s AI-enabled solutions, shaped by our innovative mindset, help our clients unlock business value at scale from the ServiceNow platform,” said Asish Ramchandran, Chief Commercial Officer, ServiceNow Alliance at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “As a ServiceNow customer, we see the value of the platform, which will only be augmented by the addition of advanced AI capabilities, enhancing experiences and productivity for our people and clients globally while ultimately driving positive business outcomes and greater efficiency.”

Coursera

“With Now Assist for ITSM, we are able to resolve more incidents in less time, increasing productivity for the IT team while improving our employee experience,” said Darla Wolf, Senior Digital Employee Experience Manager at Coursera. “At Coursera, using generative AI tools to boost the IT team’s efficiency has enabled us to improve support for employees, who are working every day to help millions of learners and organizations access world-class learning from top universities and companies.”

NEC Corporation

“NEC has been advancing our corporate transformation with the aim of maximizing corporate value in terms of business strategy, business portfolio, financial strategy, culture, and people. Through collaboration with ServiceNow, NEC will promote efforts to integrate generative AI into every aspect of employee digital experiences and drive initiatives for advanced utilization. This will enable us not only to obtain profound expertise in digital transformation, but also to create social value,” said Hiroshi Kodama, Corporate EVP, Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, NEC Corporation. “We will continue to help our customers progress towards their transformation goals as well as creating a better society. I believe ServiceNow and NEC will achieve this together throughout our further collaboration.”

Travelport

“As a B2B business, leveraging the generative AI capabilities within ServiceNow’s Now Assist for CSM will greatly improve our ability to support our customers. These new capabilities will allow us to quickly provide a specific answer to customers' queries, so they can get back to servicing their own customers,” said Lori Cobb, Sr. Director Digital & Technology, Global Customer Operations & Support, Travelport. “The ability to summarize the support case details during the escalation process and case closing notes will reduce the clerical work performed by our help desk agents. Removing this after call work from their daily tasks will enable them to focus on providing premier support to our customers.”

Western Sydney University

“WSU is constantly exploring new ways to deliver personalized experiences to our students and staff. Innovating with cutting-edge technologies we aim to be a market leader in transforming the higher education landscape. Our approach to AI is always with our people at the heart, ensuring that this technology continuously enhances and adds value to the human experience,” said Peter Tow, Executive Director, Strategic Project, Implementation, and Improvements at Western Sydney University. “We are very excited for ServiceNow to introduce generative AI across its workflows as part of its Now Platform Vancouver release. With these new capabilities, we will be able to harness the power of generative AI to drive innovation, enhance productivity, and tackle complex challenges at scale with creativity and precision for the benefit of our people.”

Pricing and availability

With the launch of Now Assist, ServiceNow also rolled out its generative AI pricing packages. These new SKUs allow customers to get started with Now Assist quickly and easily through pricing models built on a number of factors including value, flexibility, and simplicity. Details about generative AI pricing can be found here.

All generative AI innovations announced today are part of ServiceNow’s Now Platform Vancouver release and will be generally available in the ServiceNow Store on Sept. 29 to all customers. Information about additional Vancouver innovations can be found here.

Recognized for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute

Sinch, which powers meaningful conversations between businesses and their customers through its Customer Communications Cloud, today announced that the company has been positioned as a Leader in the first 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS). The evaluation was based on specific criteria that analyzed Sinch's overall Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. 

Magic Quadrant reports are a culmination of rigorous, fact-based research in specific markets, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the providers in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct. Providers are positioned into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. The research enables you to get the most from market analysis in alignment with your unique business and technology needs. 

"The recognition as a Leader, we feel, validates our strong position in a global and growing market," said Sinch CEO Laurinda Pang. "Business leaders and decision makers now recognize that a great customer experience will leverage the right communications channel, at the right time, and that businesses need to keep pace with their customers as consumer preferences evolve. We feel our strong ability to deliver against these needs is reflected in the new Magic Quadrant, recognizing the value that Sinchers around the globe deliver to our more than 150,000 business customers."