The company appoints Mike D'Aloia as Executive Vice President, Head of Sales, and Laurie Pace as Senior Vice President of Marketing

 NetBase Quid®, a global leader in AI-powered consumer and market intelligence, today announced Laurie Pace, as Senior Vice President of Marketing, and Mike D'Aloia, as Executive Vice President, Head of Sales. These strategic hires reflect NetBase Quid's ongoing commitment to being a trusted partner, providing customers with unmatched consumer and market intelligence on a global scale.

"Technology is evolving at an unprecedented pace and advancements in AI, machine learning, and data analytics have opened up endless possibilities for brands," said NetBase Quid CEO, Peter Caswell. "Both Mike and Laurie bring with them a proven track record leading companies towards a new level of success and I'm excited to have them join us as we continue to expand our product and service offerings."

D'Aloia is an accomplished sales leader who brings over 25 years of experience to his new role at NetBase Quid. He has held multiple positions in executive sales, most recently as Senior Vice President of Global Enterprise Sales and Account Management with Brandwatch. Before that, D'Aloia was the Director of Global Sales at Forrester. In his role at NetBase Quid as the Executive Vice President of Sales, D'Aloia will play a pivotal role in formulating and executing the company's sales strategy, driving revenue generation, and fostering strong customer relationships.

"The choice to join NetBase Quid was an easy one as the company is the clear leader in empowering today's biggest brands with data-driven insights," said Mike D'Aloia. "I'm passionate about working with collaborative teams to drive results and I'm looking forward to lending my sales experience to accelerate the company's vision."

Pace, an accomplished marketing executive with over 15 years of experience, joins Netbase Quid as the Senior Vice President of Marketing. As the North American VP of Marketing, Global PR, and Analyst Relations at Quinyx, Pace played a pivotal role in driving the company's growth and expansion into new markets. While at the company, she spearheaded Quinyx's marketing efforts in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, successfully positioning the brand and facilitating its entry into these regions. Prior to that, Pace was the VP of Marketing at Ubeeqo, acquired by Europcar. As the newly appointed Senior Vice President of Marketing, Pace will spearhead NetBase Quid's marketing efforts, playing a key role in driving the company's strategic expansion.

"I'm very excited to join the team at NetBase Quid and use my marketing experience to conquer the consumer intelligence space," said Laurie Pace. "NetBase Quid is at the forefront of AI-powered consumer and market intelligence and this role promises new frontiers. I'm looking forward to being a part of NetBase Quid's next chapter."

These appointments are the latest to expand NetBase Quid's national footprint as the company continues to embrace a global remote collaborative workforce.

Prophecy also announces Prophecy Data Copilot, an AI assistant that automatically generates trusted data pipelines and improves data quality.

Prophecy, the low-code data transformation platform, today announced two new product offerings: Prophecy Generative AI Platform and Prophecy Data Copilot.

The new Prophecy Generative AI Platform provides a simple way for organizations to power generative AI applications using privately-owned, enterprise data. This new offering leverages Prophecy's flagship product, the low-code data transformation platform.

In addition, Prophecy is also announcing the launch of the Prophecy Data Copilot, an AI assistant that automatically creates data pipelines based on natural language prompts, and improves pipeline quality with greater test coverage.

“We are seeing tremendous results from building applications that combine enterprise data with off-the-shelf LLM models. Our belief is that for the vast majority of enterprise use cases, the era of hiring machine learning engineers who train proprietary models, or specialized LLMs is over,” shared Prophecy Co-Founder and CEO, Raj Bains. “Now all you will need is a private knowledge warehouse that provides private context along with questions and the LLMs give very relevant answers. With Prophecy’s new platform release, a data or application engineer can build an application like a support-bot on private data in a week”.

Generative AI technology is becoming mainstream, with nearly all businesses looking to adopt and implement this technology into their existing workflows. But today's generative AI applications are trained against public data, limiting their usefulness when it comes to answering questions that are specific to an organization. The Prophecy Generative AI Platform democratizes AI for technical and non-technical teams by:

• Putting the power of generative AI against enterprise data in the hands of every user in every organization
• Speeding up the development of generative AI applications against enterprise data
• Supporting nearly unlimited use cases by leveraging the full breadth of enterprise data

“We see generative AI based copilots making low-code the default way to build applications and data pipelines in enterprises,” shared Prophecy Co-Founder, Maciej Szpakowski. “We already see a 30-40% productivity boost from low-code adoption in our customer base, that coupled with another 30-40% from copilots will make starting with code financially untenable for the majority of enterprise use cases. The future of enterprise development is definitely copilot powered low-code, and we’re excited to see our customers get this boost as they adopt Prophecy Data Copilot.”

Prophecy Data Copilot assists and automates numerous data-related tasks. Data Copilot:

• Democratizes the creation and delivery of data products. Data products are underpinned by data transformations. With Copilot, users can describe transformations using natural language. Copilot then converts these natural language prompts into Prophecy visual components and transformation logic, along with corresponding code.
• Improves efficiency and quality of pipeline creation. Copilot suggests data tests, enabling greater test coverage and increasing confidence in data. Copilot also suggests what transformations to use next, minimizing errors when joining, filtering, and aggregating data.
• Prevents data misuse. Copilot automatically generates descriptions for data pipelines and datasets. This includes, for example, an explanation of how a column was computed.

“Generative AI and LLMs have become mainstream practically overnight and the hype is warranted,” shared SanjMo Principal, Sanjeev Mohan. “However, today’s applications, such as ChatGPT, artificially constrain the usefulness to data that is available in the public domain. The next frontier is applying this power technology to privately-held, enterprise data, something I didn’t think would happen till years from now. These new solutions from Prophecy will enable teams to use their data to move the needle in significant ways.”

With the launch and platform updates, Prophecy further democratizes data transformation, boosting productivity and empowering non-technical users to access and leverage data in their everyday workflows.

Seasoned Go-To-Market Executive to Help Lead Klaviyo’s Next Growth Chapter

Klaviyo, a marketing automation and customer data platform that drives revenue growth for businesses of all sizes, today announced that Steve Rowland will join the company as President, effective July 3, 2023. Reporting to Co-founder and CEO, Andrew Bialecki, Rowland will lead Klaviyo’s marketing, partnerships, sales and customer success & support initiatives.

Rowland brings 25 years of experience in high-growth technology organizations across the globe. He most recently served as Chief Revenue Officer of Okta (NASDAQ: OKTA), where he was responsible for driving revenue growth streams. Prior to Okta, Rowland was the Vice President of Americas Sales at Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK) and served as President at DataStax, leading all go-to-market functions. Rowland has also served as Senior Vice President of worldwide Sales at Apigee; Vice President of Field Operations for the Americas and Asia Pacific at Blue Coat Systems; and Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Workbrain Corporation. Rowland earned a B.S. in Engineering from Texas A&M University.

“Steve brings decades of go-to-market experience driving revenue at high-growth SaaS companies, and we’re thrilled to have him join our team of Klaviyos,” said Andrew Bialecki, Co-founder and CEO of Klaviyo. “His decision to join Klaviyo is a testament to the strength of our platform, the culture we’ve cultivated, and our relentless pursuit of delighting our customers.”

“Klaviyo has created a vertically integrated platform that is fast, comprehensive, and drives meaningful growth for businesses,” said Rowland. “In addition to being an important player in the ecommerce space, Klaviyo is having early success as it expands into new verticals. I’m honored and excited to be joining such an impressive team and culture, and I can’t wait to get started.”

Partnership with the World's Largest Set of Commerce Signals Connects Consumers Across Devices and Channels, Revealing Behaviors and Intent Across the Purchase Process

 Omnicom Media Group, the media services division of Omnicom Group Inc. NYSE:OMC today announced a collaboration with Criteo NASDAQ: CRTO, the global commerce media company with the world's largest set of commerce signals, that will take commerce media to the next level by enabling  high precision, real-time targeting across all commerce channels and devices, and at any point in the purchase process.  

The partnership marks the first time that an agency holding company will have access to the high-value signals and performative insights in Criteo's Commerce Grid – the industry's first Supply Side Platform (SSP) purpose-built for commerce – for activation through alternative buying platforms.

Working with clean room provider InfoSum, OMG and Criteo will match audience data from Omni, Omnicom's open source operating system, and client 1P data with Criteo's insights of shopping intent for more than 750 million daily active users - in a privacy-safe way  -  to reach the desired commerce audience with unparalleled precision and efficiency. OMG will then  package desired commerce segments with OMG curated premium inventory from Commerce Grid's 1500+ directly integrated publishers for activation in OMG's preferred Demand Side Platform (DSPs), streamlining holistic campaign management, reporting, and optimization.

Leveraging the combined technology and data assets of Criteo and Omni, OMG Investment & Activation brands will be able to find and engage audiences based on real-time shopping data, habits, and affinities, in premium environments across all channels and devices, and at any stage of the purchase process, driving higher engagement and conversion rates for Omnicom clients.

"Simply stated, this partnership enables us to reach consumers in the places they shop, and see who's who's buying what and where they're buying it, " says OMG Chief Activation Officer Megan Pagliuca, "adding another unique capability to our  portfolio of first mover connected commerce partnerships  that are delivering competitive advantage for our  clients. "

Adds Criteo Global Chief Revenue Officer Brian Gleason, "This  partnership demonstrates Criteo's value in driving superior commerce outcomes for advertisers, and the company's commitment to giving agency partners like OMG greater flexibility in how they can activate Criteo's unique Commerce Audiences, coupled with premium supply, through their preferred demand platforms."

According to Forbes, in 2023 the e-Commerce industry is set to generate $6.3 trillion globally. To put that in perspective, if online sales were a country, it would have the third-highest GDP of anywhere in the world, second only to China and the USA. Current growth projections for 2023 are 10.4%.

Hindering marketers' ability to drive engagement and conversion in e-Commece environments: commerce media on the open internet is fragmented, with demand side platforms (DSPs), supply side platforms (SSPs), and retail SSPs all operating separately. As privacy regulations continue to grow and third-party cookie deprecation looms, marketers and media owners will be looking for more streamlined solutions to manage, scale, and activate first-party data and addressable audiences.

"The meteoric rise of retail media is inextricably linked to the rapid adoption of data clean room," says Brian Lesser, Chairman and CEO of Infosum. "By leveraging these data collaboration technologies, for the first time, multiple companies can collaborate using first- and second-party data to deliver powerful retail media experiences while fully protecting the privacy of consumers and safeguarding the security of their data."

Esteemed Investors Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel Rally Behind AI-Powered Creative Studio Praised by Millions of Creators

Captions, the leading AI-powered creative studio, announced today that they have raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins, a renowned venture capital firm in the technology industry. Other esteemed investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel also participated, bringing the total capital raised to date to $40 million. With positive cash flow and impressive growth, Captions solidifies its position as a disruptor in video editing, officially launching its flagship product after a successful debut on the Apple App Store in January 2021. The Series B funding marks a significant milestone for Captions, enabling the company to further level the playing field for creators by offering the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to develop and publish studio-grade content with the power of AI.

“Our vision for Captions goes well beyond just video creation. It’s about empowering individuals, regardless of background or experience, by providing them with tools to effectively communicate their ideas or stories,” said Gaurav Misra, co-founder and CEO of Captions. “Video content is undergoing a remarkable transformation, with a major trend towards ‘talking videos’—where creators address the camera directly to share opinions or personal stories. To support this evolution, we have developed user-friendly features that enhance ‘talking videos’ and make creating high-quality content more accessible.”

The Series B funding builds upon earlier investments, including a seed round and a Series A round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Prestigious investors such as Uncommon Projects, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Lenny Rachitsky, Julie Zhuo, Antoine Martin, Nico Wittenborn, Jacob Andreou, Ben Rubin, Jaren Glover, Chapter One, 20VC, Ludlow Ventures, among others, also participated in these earlier funding efforts.

“AI is redefining how digital products are created, and Captions has emerged as the leading AI-powered platform for video content. Millions of users have already leveraged it to tell their stories and engage audiences,” said Everett Randle, partner of Kleiner Perkins. “Gaurav and the Captions team have deep empathy for and understanding of creators from their time at Snap that we believe is critical in building within this new era of AI-enabled product development. We’re thrilled to lead Captions’ Series B and support the creation of the AI-powered creative studio.”

Since its inception in 2021, Captions has experienced exceptional growth, mobilizing over three million creators to produce studio-quality videos with ease, directly from their mobile devices. Within the first six months of its debut, Captions witnessed an astounding achievement, with over 100,000 active daily users and more than one million videos created on the platform each month. This accomplishment highlights Captions’ success in upending the content creation and distribution landscape, making a significant impact on the creator economy. It further cements their position as innovators in the realm of next-generation storytelling.

“We were immediately drawn to Gaurav’s discerning eye for design and proven experience building world-class products at companies like Snap and Microsoft,” said Mike Vernal of Sequoia Capital. “Captions’ use of AI for video production has the potential to revolutionize the studio experience for today’s creator economy. The user enthusiasm and loyalty Captions has experienced this early on is a clear indication of their future success. We are excited to partner with Gaurav and team and cheer them on in the next phase of their business.”

Captions has introduced a new concept of a one-stop AI-powered creative studio, dedicated to enhancing “talking videos”. As a trusted creative partner and super-assistant, Captions simplifies and automates various aspects of video production, including captioning, editing, dubbing, script creation, and music integration. This streamlines the video creation process, making it quick and easy for creators of all skill levels to bring their vision to life with just a few quick taps.

“When we first met with Gaurav and Dwight over two years ago, we were excited by their mission to democratize video creation at scale—first with tools for ‘talking videos’ which make up a large percentage of short form video consumption, and more recently through a growing suite of public and forthcoming products that combine cutting edge AI technologies and strong consumer design sensibilities,” added Bryan Kim, investment partner of Andreessen Horowitz.

Captions offers a range of cutting-edge features designed to ease and enhance the process of developing premium video content. Prominent features include:

• Al Dubbing: Seamlessly dubs the speaker’s voice into another language, empowering creators to overcome language barriers and reach new audiences.
• AI Shorts: Automatically extracts viral-worthy clips from any long-form video, allowing creators to easily promote long-form content and maximize the value of existing material.
• Al Voiceover: Generates a voiceover indistinguishable from human-voice based on text alone, enabling creators to narrate their videos effortlessly without recording themselves.
• AI Zoom: Automatically incorporates relevant zooms to keep the video captivating and engaging.
• AI Eye Contact: Corrects the subject’s eye contact to give the impression of looking directly at the camera, fostering a more engaging connection with viewers.
• AI Music: Automatically composes unique and royalty-free music tailored to each video, elevating the overall production value.
• AI Images and Emojis: Automatically inserts relevant images and emojis into videos, enhancing visual storytelling and audience engagement.

The CommerceIQ Insights Google Chrome plugin harnesses generative AI for content and customer sentiment insights - all directly within Amazon product display pages

CommerceIQ, the leading Retail Ecommerce Management (REM) Platform, today announced the launch of CommerceIQ Insights, its industry-first content optimization extension for brands on Amazon, which uses generative AI to provide insights and improvement suggestions directly on Amazon product display pages (PDP). With CommerceIQ Insights, brands can optimize their Amazon content and better understand current customer sentiment by product in an intuitive and user-friendly interface. CommerceIQ Insights is available to all free of charge for Google Chrome in the Google Play store.

“Just as the advent of the internet transformed retail, generative AI will reshape ecommerce over the next several years. CommerceIQ is excited to be taking steps toward that transformation today with the CommerceIQ Insights plugin, where anyone can experience just one small part of our REM platform’s AI insights,” said Guru Hariharan, CEO, CommerceIQ. “Whether you are a CommerceIQ customer, or a brand interested in the future of retail, the CommerceIQ Insights plugin shows how generative AI can boost your business with actionable insights that provide a pulse on your customers, along with recommendations that can increase conversion.”

One-Click Content Suggestions

CommerceIQ Insights enables brands to harness the power of generative AI with a single click. While on any Amazon PDP, AI driven recommendations deliver highly targeted suggestions for product titles and product description bullet points, leveraging CommerceIQ analytics for trending keywords by category. This increases organic search relevance at no additional cost and can significantly improve page conversion. The suggestions and insights are based on CommerceIQ’s deep analytics from working with 1000s of brands on Amazon, combined with generative AI technology.

Sentiment Analysis

CommerceIQ Insights also provides sentiment analysis insights based on key themes in the product’s ratings and reviews. Brands can view a product’s potential improvements, along with both critical and encouraging feedback, to identify and resolve any product or service issues, and inform future product development. By viewing this data on competing products, brands can also identify gaps in the market.

CommerceIQ clients can get even more performance insights when they use CommerceIQ Insights by harnessing their data from the CommerceIQ platform within the plugin.

Omnicom Group Inc. today announced a first-mover collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reimagine creativity and accelerate innovation with generative AI foundational models for advertising. As part of the collaboration, Omnicom will use AWS generative AI and machine learning (ML) services, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon EC2 Trn1n instances powered by AWS Trainium chips that are purpose-built for ML workloads, to help accelerate the transformation of advertising campaign development.

Working with AWS, Omnicom will advance its AI-powered platform Omni – an open operating system which today uses AWS to ingest trillions of advertising signals monthly and store more than 10 petabytes of data – by creating new foundational models that help automate activities such as developing creative briefs, media plans, ad creative, audience segmentation, and performance measurement.

This collaboration will expand how Omnicom leverages their industry-leading datasets within Omni and will add capabilities powered by out-of-the box foundational models (FM) via Amazon Bedrock. Omnicom will run these generative AI models using AWS Inferentia ML inference chips, designed to deliver performance at the lowest cost, as well as low-energy efficiency purpose-built chips, designed with low-energy efficiency deep learning (DL) inference applications.

Pairing Omnicom's open operating system with AWS generative AI services and purpose-built silicon for machine learning will help improve and further enable the automation of the entire advertising campaign and creative journey development on behalf of brands. It will help empower marketers to fully harness data insights and reinvent their customer experiences with less heavy lifting.

"We are committed to our mission of creating end-to-end solutions for clients, everywhere, swiftly and efficiently," said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. "The innovation, security, simplicity, and reliability of AWS machine-learning and generative AI services help us accelerate our data capabilities to deliver transformational innovation and results to our customers. We look forward to getting unique access of AWS models and together pioneering the complete transformation of the advertising campaign end-to-end journey together."

"It's important for us to find transformational ways to help advertisers reach their goals," said Adam Gitlin, President, Annalect. "Amazon Bedrock, together with AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia chips purpose built for machine learning will help us accelerate the transformation of advertising campaign development, creative generation, insights and recommendations. By unlocking advertisers first-party data, we can create more powerful advertising campaigns through trained, purpose-built LLMs that are unique to them, secure, protected, and private."

"For more than a decade, Omnicom has worked with AWS to boost its creative processes with the latest technological advances. Generative AI will soon change the advertising industry completely, and we're excited to continue experimenting with Amazon Bedrock foundation models (FMs) so that our customers can benefit from these recent advancements," said Vasi Philomin, Vice President, Generative AI at AWS. "By using Amazon Bedrock, our ML capabilities, and FMs, Omnicom will help brands transform their customer experiences and marketing outcomes."

Groundbreaking Technology Uses Advanced Detectors to Identify and Stop Malicious Bots that Compromise the Security of APIs; Early Release Now Available

Wallarm, the end-to-end API security company, today announced the early release of its API Abuse Prevention feature to address one of the most critical API threats: bot-based attacks. Wallarm can now accurately identify and mitigate API bot activity, protecting systems against API abuse, account takeover (ATO), and price scraping. This new feature prevents potential revenue loss, protects customer information, and defends against reputational damage, while ensuring the best possible experience for legitimate API users.

“Bots are a growing threat to API security, and traditional methods of prevention have proven to be ineffective,” said Ivan Novikov, CEO of Wallarm. “Our API Abuse Prevention feature is a game-changer. It can accurately detect and stop a wide range of bot types, without relying on JavaScript challenges. This provides our customers with a highly effective solution to protect their APIs from bot-based attacks.”

"As the fintech, healthtech, and e-commerce industries continue to evolve, API security has become more crucial than ever, with bots posing an increasing threat. Traditional security measures, such as WAFs and WAAP tools, have demonstrated their inadequacy in mitigating these risks," explained Ivan Novikov, CEO of Wallarm. "Our API Abuse Prevention feature offers an innovative solution to this problem, accurately detecting and neutralizing various bot types without the complex deployment. This empowers our clients with a highly effective defense against bot-driven attacks on their APIs."

Bots are a significant threat to the security of APIs and a massive concern for organizations of all sizes. In recent years, there have been several high-profile incidents of API abuse, including the theft of customer data, Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, and unauthorized access to sensitive information. These incidents have highlighted the need for effective solutions to prevent API abuse.

Wallarm’s API Abuse Prevention provides organizations with a highly effective solution to protect APIs from bot-based attacks by using specialized detectors to identify and stop a wide range of bot types, including stuffing bots, spiders, scanners, security crawlers, and scalper bots. These detectors can detect bot activity based on several factors, such as request patterns, timing anomalies, and API endpoint behaviors. It is designed to provide organizations with customizable protection against malicious automated behavior that blocks the bad while allowing the good—and at scale.

While traditional bot protection products are mostly focused on the web application, Wallarm’s API Abuse Prevention is specifically developed to mitigate automated actions against APIs where competing solutions fall short. It is delivered on the existing Wallarm Advanced API Security platform, enabling customers to reduce tool sprawl, analyst workload and fatigue, and operational costs. Additionally, Wallarm API Abuse Prevention includes detailed reporting and analysis, allowing organizations to better understand the nature and full scope of bot activity on their APIs, which can be used to improve overall API security and prevent future attacks.