NewRoad Capital Partners Completes Round, Joins Progress Ventures, Top VCs and Investors Gary Vaynerchuk, Marc Lore, and Alex Rodriguez to Back Innovative Data Stack Solution

Tracer, the leading data intelligence platform, announced today the completion of an oversubscribed Series A fundraise co-led by NewRoad Capital Partners, Progress Ventures, and BDMI, part of Bertelsmann's corporate venture arm Bertelsmann Investments. S4S Ventures and Arbour Way Investors also participated in the series. The close of the round was accompanied by the addition of John Sheehy, Operating Partner at NewRoad Capital Partners, to its Board of Directors.

Incubated out of VaynerMedia in 2015 by co-founders Jeffrey Nicholson and Leighton Welch to automate analytics across every client globally, Tracer processed more than $1B in transactions before spinning off into a stand-alone entity in 2021. Today, Nicholson serves as Tracer CEO and Welch as CTO. The company also recently appointed accomplished integrated marketing leader Obele Brown-West as President to spearhead Tracer's revenue, operations and strategic growth initiatives.

An advertising and media veteran, new board member Sheehy was Global Brand President of Starcom Worldwide and a member of the Publicis Media global leadership team prior to joining NewRoad Capital Partners in 2022. Before Starcom, Sheehy was a member of the Leo Burnett global management team. With more than three decades of marketing and consulting experience, Sheehy will provide valuable guidance to the fast-growing company. Joining Sheehy on the Board, alongside Gary Vaynerchuk who retains his previously held seat: Adriaan Zur Muhlen, Managing Partner of Progress Ventures; Sanja Partalo, Co-founder and Managing Partner of S4S Ventures; and Keith Titan, Partner at BDMI.

"Developed by true industry experts, Tracer has solved a global industry issue: the challenge of ingesting and managing the growing number of moving parts, partners, and channels around digital data management and reporting," said Sheehy. "Jeff and Leighton are the experts in this battle and have surrounded themselves with world-class talent to carve out their leadership position."

Tracer has amassed a portfolio of high-profile clients such as Sanofi, Condé Nast, Papa Johns, Headspace, Media.Monks, and January Digital. A growing number of the world's top brands, agencies and holding companies are turning to the data platform to achieve greater transparency, customization and impact-driven reporting from their modern marketing tech stack.

"Tracer is at a significant inflection point in solving one of the media and marketing industries' biggest problems: turning data into informed decisions," said Jeff Nicholson, Tracer co-founder and CEO. "In a challenging funding and growth landscape, we are humbled by the confidence our investors have in our potential. This oversubscribed round is a testament to the value we've proven our platform can deliver, and we look forward to working with John [Sheehy], our Board, and the industry giants who have joined as investors to catapult Tracer forward."

Tracer's executive vision, strong enterprise client portfolio and remarkable customer retention have contributed to the confidence of its investor group, which includes Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore's VCP Ventures, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman's Thirty Five Ventures (35V), Stephen Ross and Matt Higgins' RSE Ventures, S⁴ Capital Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell, and Gary Vaynerchuk.

With offices in New York City and London, and a team of more than 70 across four continents, Tracer's innovation has been celebrated by reputable industry organizations and publications. Most recently, the company was named to The Lead's 'The Leading 100' list, which recognizes the most innovative, high-impact tech start-ups driving business value for brands. Tracer was also honored in 2022 for its work with Sanofi by the Association of National Advertisers' Genius Award for Marketing Analytics Storytelling.

Lucid Software, the leader in visual collaboration software, today announced the launch of its latest APIs and developer platform, which will enable Lucid users and partners to better streamline their workflows by creating, publishing, and distributing their apps and integrations within the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite. Top partners utilizing the APIs and developer platform at launch include Salesforce, Slack, ServiceNow, and Notion.

"Our APIs and developer platform empower users and partners to build and deliver powerful, customized solutions for their teams and customers, further increasing efficiency and reducing context switching across apps," said Dan Lawyer, chief product officer at Lucid Software. "Today's teams need solutions that cut through the complexity and work where they work. By utilizing our latest APIs, users and partners will be able to leverage Lucid to strengthen existing workflows with the power of visual collaboration, enabling them to more quickly achieve alignment and accelerate innovation and productivity."

Users can customize Lucidchart and Lucidspark to their use cases and bring visualization into their workflows by using the developer platform to build, test and distribute apps and integrations to their teams. Users will also be able to tap into the vast resources of Lucid's extensive worldwide user base, which boasts over 60 million users, by easily sharing their apps and leveraging the creative output of other users.

The newest iteration of APIs will allow developers to create custom shape libraries, bidirectional data integrations and auto-visualizations to accommodate a wide array of use cases. This update builds upon already available functionality, such as embedding Lucid docs in other applications and managing access to docs and folders. Users can also import their own assets into Lucid (like links, photos and videos) to clarify complexity.

Examples of ways partners are already leveraging these features include:

• Salesforce: Users can easily customize templates, charts and projects in the Salesforce shape library in Lucidchart to standardize documentation across the company.
• Slack: Slack's open and extensible platform makes it easy for users to quickly create, access and share Lucid visuals without ever leaving Slack.
• ServiceNow: Users can automatically generate Lucidchart diagrams from their ServiceNow® Application Portfolio Management (APM) data to quickly visualize and understand areas for optimization across an application portfolio.
• Notion: Lucid documents can be directly embedded, viewed and shared in Notion so that teams can keep their visuals and context all in one place.
• Headroom: Users can hold AI-powered meetings directly in Lucid to transition from brainstorming to decision-making without leaving the platform.
• Streamline: Users can access Streamline's extensive library of icon and illustration sets directly in Lucid to add beautiful and consistent imagery to boards and diagrams.
• Rewatch: Rewatch videos can be shared directly into Lucid documents so users can capture, share and retain knowledge asynchronously.

The launch of Lucid's new APIs and developer platform, along with powerful data-driven visuals and existing advanced customizations and integrations, further enables users and developers to quickly build advanced workflows for their teams and get more done faster

• HCLTech will be Verizon Business's primary collaborator in all deployments involving MNS globally for enterprise customers. The company has been positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Managed Network Services* (MNS).

• Verizon Business will lead sales, solutioning, and customer acquisitions, and HCLTech will lead post-sale implementations and ongoing support, bringing the best of both companies to better serve the needs of our customers around the world.

• Customers will benefit from a best-in-class MNS portfolio, a highly digitized experience with data-driven service models, modernized frictionless interface with enhanced lifecycle management, a broad end-to-end partner ecosystem, and joint innovation on an integrated platform.

Verizon Business today announced a strategic global partnership making HCLTech its primary Managed Network Services (MNS) collaborator in all networking deployments for global enterprise customers, bringing together two global leaders in enterprise networking. The partnership combines Verizon’s networking power, solutioning, and scale with HCLTech’s market leading Managed Service capabilities to usher in a new era of large-scale wireline service delivery for enterprise customers.

Verizon Business will continue to lead all customer acquisition, sales, solutioning, and overall planning and development with its customers. HCLTech will lead post-sale implementation and ongoing support. To execute the tightly coordinated balance of responsibilities at enterprise scale, a select group of Verizon Business Global Customer Operations staff will transition to HCLTech.

The partnership will offer customers a best-in-class MNS portfolio, a highly digitized experience with data-driven service models, enhanced efficiency and lifecycle management with frictionless interface, a broad end-to-end partner ecosystem, and joint innovation on an integrated platform.

These improvements will help customers navigate increasingly complex operating environments -- across diverse locations, geographies, and devices -- while incorporating new technologies into their stack, including 5G, SD-WAN and SASE capabilities. HCLTech’s digital-native MNS platforms and customer interfaces are designed to help them manage that digitally, quickly, and seamlessly.

Verizon Business’s global reach and localized enterprise presence together with HCLTech’s digitally optimized platforms for MNS give customers a flexible networking framework to build out with new technology and drive more efficient operations. Customers can better control and scale their consumption of network services, better incorporate their broader ecosystem of technology partners, converge informational and operational technology (IT/OT) undertakings, and generally become more agile in accommodating ever changing technology needs.

“HCLTech is a widely recognized industry leader for Managed Network Services, and with their IT service expertise and ongoing support of our enterprise networking deployments, Verizon Business can modernize our service delivery and simultaneously heighten our focus on helping customers incorporate next-generation technology like 5G, SD-WAN and SASE into their operations and their own customer offerings,” said Kyle Malady, CEO, Verizon Business. “IT/OT convergence is the future of data-centric business operations, and with the fast-accelerating pace of digitalization, customers need a well-coordinated delivery framework to realize that future.”

“Managed Network Services is core to our business, and we’re proud to collaborate with Verizon Business to lead MNS in all of their network deployments, modernization and operations for private enterprise,” said C Vijayakumar, CEO and Managing Director, HCLTech. “Our data-driven service delivery, advanced network capabilities and frictionless customer interfaces combined with the unique strengths and resiliency of the Verizon network will enable enterprises to drive better business outcomes and time to market. I am excited to welcome the incoming employees from Verizon Business Global Customer Operations and look forward to a successful and fulfilling journey together.”

*Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Managed Network Services, December 2022. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, Nasdaq: VZ) was formed on June 30, 2000 and is one of the world’s leading providers of technology and communications services. Headquartered in New York City and with a presence around the world, Verizon generated revenues of $136.8 billion in 2022. The company offers voice, data and video services and solutions on its award-winning networks and platforms, delivering on customers’ demand for mobility, reliable network connectivity, security and control. Verizon was the first company in the world to launch commercial 5G for mobility, fixed wireless and mobile edge computing. The company's operating structure focuses on two customer-facing areas: Consumer and Business. Citizen Verizon is the company’s responsible business plan for economic, environmental and social advancement.

New offering helps companies avoid high-risk events that can damage consumer trust

Lumen Technologies, is introducing Lumen® Data Protect, a service for companies battling the growing risks associated with data corruption and security failure. Lumen Data Protect is an enterprise grade, fully managed data protection service built on the Lumen edge and backed by the company's substantial global fiber network.

The volume of critical data organizations collect continues to grow. Future-safe minded organizations are looking for simple, comprehensive ways to detect data disasters. Leadership is demanding better data protection to avert high profile events that can cost companies time, money, and reputation.

"Threats of ransomware and data corruption are constant. Protecting critical business data and applications has never been more important to an organization's bottom line or reputation," said Steve Grabow, senior vice president, edge computing solutions, Lumen. "We understand what it takes to protect data across edge and cloud environments. We are bringing organizations the right solution with Lumen Data Protect."

Lumen Data Protect allows for quick, easy, and cost-efficient backup and recovery of critical business data and applications, wherever they reside. Companies benefit from infrastructure-free, pay-as-you-go data protection that dynamically scales to meet changing business needs. Lumen Data Protect is also flexible with several on- or off-site storage options. This offering harnesses the power of data protection technology from industry leader, Commvault. Lumen is a Commvault Global Design Partner.

Jeli.io, the incident response and analysis company founded by former Netflix and Slack engineering leader Nora Jones, today announced they have integrated ChatGPT into their platform. Since launching the company in late 2020, the company has been on a mission to facilitate the collaboration between humans and the technical systems they rely on (also known as “socio-technical” systems). Jeli is at the forefront of leveraging the power of large language models (LLMs) to help teams respond to and ultimately learn from incidents, and has now opened up their AI beta to enterprise customers.

“The secret to understanding your incidents is hidden in how you make decisions during them – often that data is overlooked because there is so much of it to sift through,” said Nora Jones, CEO and Founder of Jeli.io. “Building ChatGPT into many of our products is a means to help organizations key into where, when, and how certain decisions are being made so ultimately they can improve. ChatGPT and other models today are great at summarizing data and extracting key points out of it – our use of it in Jeli incentivizes incident responders to dig deeper into areas that will yield high return for the organization.”

New AI-Driven Features

Status Updates: The new ‘catch me up’ feature leverages ChatGPT to provide new incident responders with a quick summary of an incident as soon as they join a Slack channel to quickly get them up to speed. It also provides various teams across the organization such as support and customer success with key highlights that they can relay to customers for real-time external communication and status updates.

Narrative Builder: Narrative Builder puts together the story about how events unfolded, using AI to highlight key moments associated with Detection, Diagnosis, and Repair phases of an incident, while surfacing the knowledge possessed by key stakeholders across the organization involved with the incident. Team members can now work alongside Jeli automation to tag, categorize, and edit on the incident timeline created by Jeli.

Jeli leverages failures and system emergencies as a catalyst to help companies understand how they can improve reliability and reduce recurring issues. Since launching, the company’s revenue has increased over 10X and total funding has grown to $19 Million.

The platform surfaces the coordination costs of incidents, builds expertise amongst team members, and generates recommendations to help address problems before they become severe. Jeli also combines disparate systems involved in incident response such as Slack, Zoom, and Jira to surface insights across various incidents for a deeper, yet efficient analysis of what went sideways and how to learn from it.

Advanced voice AI modifies any audio track to turn a single Connected TV ad into thousands of ready-to-launch contextual versions—personalized for each viewer—in just minutes

Instreamatic, whose advanced AI-powered voice and audio marketing solutions empower brands to better engage with consumers, today announced the launch of Contextual CTV Ads. The Contextual CTV Ads platform combines Instreamatic’s expertise in audio marketing technology and generative voice AI. The result is a unique solution enabling brands to take the audio from a single ad and automatically create thousands of contextually-targeted ad variations with state-of-the-art speech quality—in minutes and at scale.

Audiences viewing conventional connected TV (CTV) advertising campaigns delivered during streaming content increasingly tune out ads that aren’t particularly attention-grabbing or personally relevant. Brands and advertisers are acutely aware of the power of ad personalization and addressing customers in their context to influence customer behavior and to improve ad campaign ROI. Precise contextual alignment in ad campaigns significantly increases brand favorability, search intent, and purchase intent. However, until now, brands and advertisers pursuing contextual CTV ad campaigns have faced prohibitive time and cost hurdles. Ad agencies working with traditional technologies spend months recording and revising audio and preparing complex media buys—only to achieve rudimentary contextualization. 

Built to meet these challenges, Instreamatic’s Contextual CTV Ads platform empowers brands and agencies to deliver contextual ad campaigns with unprecedented and transformative efficiency and effectiveness. Instreamatic’s advanced voice AI core enables advertisers to turn a single original CTV ad into unlimited, ready-to-launch contextualized ad versions at scale. Contextual CTV Ads allow brands to include any context parameters unique to their business and relevant to the individual viewer, including: location, time of day, the name or type of the app or streaming platform the viewer is using, local partners or offers, promo codes, nearest locations, daily events, and other parameters.

“For consumers used to broadly-targeted traditional ads, experiencing a Contextual CTV Ad is like shifting from black and white to color: there is a new, transformative attention-grabbing power and appeal when ads suddenly speak to you directly, in your moment,” said Stas Tushinskiy, CEO, Instreamatic. “Advertisers accustomed to massive budgets for painstakingly producing a small variety of ads over months can now create and deploy Contextual CTV Ads with cutting-edge quality at unlimited scale, automatically, and instantly. The result is a more personalized experience that captures consumers’ engagement far more effectively, is delivered far faster, and costs magnitudes less to create and deploy. For brands and advertisers seeking better CTV ad performance, the ROI case is clear.”

Through the power of generative AI, Contextual CTV Ads drive hyper-scale creative production and delivery at a small fraction of traditional ad production costs. Voice actors don’t have to record hundreds of ad variations; instead, advertisers can produce and revise creative in minutes—and even refresh creatives daily. Brands and advertisers can use their own voice talent or utilize Instreamatic’s diverse library of pre-approved voices. Contextual CTV Ads make it possible to hyper-personalize each ad and deliver ad sequences across campaigns that remember the context of previous interactions, taking audiences on a more meaningful journey.

“Audio tracks play an especially critical role in CTV advertising, as consumers pick up their phones or go to the kitchen when a commercial comes on—audio is often the only connection to the audience,” said Simon Dunlop, CMO, Instreamatic. “Contextual CTV Ads have the power to recapture wavering attention by addressing consumers with context that means something to them, personally, even when their eyes aren’t on the screen.”

Contextual CTV Ads also significantly optimize media buying. Instreamatic’s powerful AdVibe self-service dashboard enables advertisers to fully automate the creation of unlimited CTV ad creatives, and to use VAST tags to serve ads to the Instreamatic Ad Network or any DSP. AdVibe provides complete ad activity reporting in real-time, along with downloadable insight reports. The dashboard also enables unlimited A/B testing and creative updates, to ensure quality control and optimization across live contextual ad campaigns. Contextual CTV Ads, priced with a CPM model, fit into any existing workflow with no integration required.

Instreamatic’s Contextual CTV Ads follows the release of Contextual Audio Ads, which launched in March 2023 and is used by brands and advertisers to reach audiences on audio platforms.

New cloud-based platform transforms the challenge of multi-channel customer communications for Telecommunications, Utlities, and Healthcare

SkyCreek Corp., a leading provider of enterprise customer communication products, announces the launch of its landmark SkyCreek Enterprise Communications Platform (ECP). This single, unified platform offers customer-centric organizations a game-changing solution for orchestrating and delivering multi-channel customer communications using Email, SMS, and IVR. Currently, ECP supports companies and organizations in Telecommunications, Utilities, and Healthcare, that view personalized, relevant, accurate, and time-sensitive customer communications as business-critical. The goal is to create outstanding customer experiences, build brand credibility and loyalty, drive operational efficiencies, and boost ROI.

"The SkyCreek Enterprise Communications Platform is establishing a new standard for customer engagement with an advanced solution that creates, manages, delivers, and analyzes enterprise communications,” said Mark Wilburn, SkyCreek President. “ECP’s robust portfolio of capabilities including centralized management, configurability, and analytics is intended to solve the frustrations and workload experienced by teams in operations, customer experience, marketing, and customer care.”
For customer-centric organizations, ECP enables teams to create, manage, deploy, and analyze communications initiatives like time-critical alerts, appointment reminders, surveys, integrated marketing campaigns, billing reminders, service upgrades, and more.

Unlike similar solutions, ECP offers pre-built integrations for business systems including workforce, billing, CRM, and data ingestion. In addition, it provides existing workflow support, requires no code/low code, streamlines production, and can generate robust and actionable analytics for data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement. ECP is also designed to incorporate OTP and MFA protocols to ensure communications security for all customer touchpoints.
ECP’s configurability enables organizations to create personalized and relevant communications tailored to each customer's preferences and situation. Outreach is conducted on the customer’s channel of choice Email, SMS, or IVR reinforcing a positive customer experience. By understanding and catering to individual needs, enterprises can significantly increase customer engagement and satisfaction. This personalized approach builds stronger relationships with customers, leading to improved loyalty and higher retention rates. Wilburn concluded by saying, “An outstanding customer experience isn’t just a nice detail. It establishes clear company differentiation, builds a devoted customer base, enhances brand reputation, and increases ROI.”