Tripleseat Tickets launches today, delivering a powerful event registration and ticketing solution designed for restaurants, hotels, and unique venues.

Drives industry's AI transformation with new products, training, and thought leadership to help product teams leverage AI 

Pendo, the all-in-one product experience platform, today announced highlights from its fiscal year, which ended January 31, 2024. Notable milestones include achieving $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and its first quarter of positive cash generation, launching a record number of new products, and adding more than 400 new customers. Pendo now counts as customers 75 of the Fortune 500 and nearly half of the top 100 public software companies by market cap.

Nearly 12,000 companies use the Pendo One platform to provide better software experiences to 800 million people every month.

"Anything that can go digital has gone digital, and soon, every application will leverage AI. Pendo is helping today's product leaders and application owners navigate this massive technological shift, providing a full platform of products to help them deliver the best digital experiences to their users," said Todd Olson, CEO and co-founder of Pendo. "It was an incredible year of innovation as we began to enhance every part of our platform with AI and automation designed to drive business impact for our customers."

Highlights of the fiscal year include:

Revenue and customer growth: Driving Pendo's growth during the fiscal year were existing customer expansion, new international business, and sales of a trio of new products leading to platform upgrades. Pendo also grew its base of customers with an annual contract value over $100,000 by 20 percent and nearly doubled the number of customers paying $1 million or more.

New customers added during the second half of the year include Robert Bosch LLC and Matillion. Customers that expanded their relationships with Pendo in the second half include Brightly, a Siemens company, Motive, JobAdder, Penn Foster Group, and Yayoi.

Product innovation: Pendo announced its unified product experience platform called Pendo One, designed to help companies deliver better experiences for any user—both customers and employees. New products that build on the Pendo One platform, include:

• Session Replay: a privacy-first video playback solution that enables product teams to understand how their users interact with and navigate an application.
• Data Sync: an easy way to export product usage data from Pendo into a cloud storage destination of choice, enabling teams to analyze product data along with other business data to make more confident, data-informed decisions.
• Pendo AI: a suite of AI-powered products and features that helps 10x what companies can do, whether that's accelerating product discovery, driving product-led growth, or automating personalized in-app experiences at scale. New features include one-click in-app guides, instant summaries of qualitative user feedback, recommendations for how to improve workflows, and automated feature tagging, helping users get a fast start with Pendo.
• HubSpot integration: a holistic view of product usage and customer engagement inside both Pendo and HubSpot, allowing joint customers to act on insights from across their tech stack to improve customer engagement, satisfaction, and retention.

Community engagement: A record 1,300 product and digital leaders attended Pendo's seventh annual Pendomonium product festival in Raleigh, which explored the role of product in the age of AI. Another 3,000 product people attended Mind the Product's flagship events in San Francisco and London. Mind the Product's network of 150+ ProductTank meetups collectively gathered more than 100,000 product people for product inspiration and networking over the course of the year. Pendo and Mind the Product also launched an AI Knowledge Hub, compiling insights, perspectives, and how-tos on AI to help product leaders and application builders understand and leverage this groundbreaking technology.

Product-led leadership: Drawing on the success of its product-led certification course, Pendo launched three additional courses covering product analytics, product management basics, and AI for product management. More than 145,000 people have registered for the courses. Pendo also enhanced its own product-led growth initiative, adding to Pendo Free the ability to create roadmaps and deliver in-app NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys, along with a simplified user experience. 9,000 companies are Pendo Free users.

International growth: Revenue in Pendo's EMEA region is quickly approaching 15% of the company's total ARR. Meanwhile, revenue in Japan grew ~80% over the prior year. To accelerate growth in the region, Pendo named Kazunari Hanao as senior vice president and country manager in its Tokyo office, and added a new datacenter to enable local customers to store data in Japan.

Awards: Pendo won 13 awards over the course of its fiscal year. In its fourth quarter, Pendo was named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list for the fifth year in a row, ranked #3 in the Triangle Business Journal's Fast 50, and earned recognition as a Great Tech Place to Work at the annual NC Tech Awards.

The company signs a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS to boost marketing and development of modern generative AI applications

SingleStore, a data platform that allows you to transact, analyze and contextualize data in milliseconds, today announced it signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate their go-to-market approach. 

Enterprises are increasingly harnessing large language models (LLMs) and foundational models (FMs) to build and secure generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. With this collaboration with AWS, SingleStore is better equipped to provide the underlying architecture needed to support high scalability, real-time performance, security, ease of integration and manage AI workloads demand at scale.

“By strengthening our collaboration with AWS, we hope to continue to provide users with context for their generative AI applications with speed, scale and simplicity,” said Madhukar Kumar, CMO, SingleStore. “Working with AWS helps our customers be wiser about their investments, reduce latency in their data environments and have a unified platform for AI and machine learning (ML) features.”

Customers, like dating application Jigsaw, found that the integration of SingleStore with AWS services is key in mitigating issues with high latency and low concurrency due to an influx of users.

“Our whole network is powered by AWS, and by collaborating with SingleStore it’s so easy to integrate with our existing infrastructure,” said Jack Chamberlain, Engineering Manager, Jigsaw Dating. “The shift to SingleStore was a model of excellence and seamlessness.”

SingleStore has established a longstanding relationship with AWS, offering a real-time data platform tailored for operational analytics and AI/ML-driven applications that demand rapid data ingestion, high-performance queries, and scalable operations. The SingleStore Managed Service, a fully managed, on-demand, and elastic relational database, is effortlessly deployable on AWS. Moreover, SingleStore can be implemented on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, within a customer-provided virtual private cloud (VPC), or a newly created VPC. AWS enriches SingleStore's offerings with a range of services including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, as well as Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock. These services facilitate real-time analytics across both streaming and historical data, enable the development and operation of ML models, and empower the delivery of cutting-edge generative AI applications.

Finally, SingleStore has been on a fast-track leading innovation around generative AI. The company was ranked #2 in the emerging category of vector databases and was recognized by TrustRadius as a top vector database in 2023.

Basic one-way messaging gives way to rich two-way conversations at scale; improves returns from advertising, marketing, and support investments for digital leaders

Gupshup, the conversational engagement pioneer, today announced the launch of Conversation Cloud, a comprehensive suite of SaaS tools that are set to revolutionize business-to-customer interactions. AI-powered conversations represent the next major paradigm shift in user interfaces after web and app, and the Conversation Cloud provides businesses with the essential tools for customer engagement in this new era. 

Gupshup enables businesses to drive customer acquisition, engagement, commerce, and support, on conversational channels such as WhatsApp, RCS, Instagram, Voice, etc, helping them achieve substantial ROI increase (6-10X).

The Conversation Cloud consists of three key modules, Converse, Advertise, and Communicate, that enable conversational relationship management across the full customer lifecycle.

Gupshup Converse helps businesses build rich two-way conversational journeys across the customer lifecycle. Business users can leverage advanced no-code tools to configure customer journeys, bot flows, and auto-trigger contextual messages. Interactions across the customer funnel leverage Gupshup Customer360's unified profiles based on customer attributes and real-time conversational events. Marketers can create granular segments and engage customers better with personalized experiences. The Converse product comes packed with conversational commerce modules such as catalogs, payment integrations, and agent-assist to enable automated or human-assisted commerce.

Converse also includes ACE LLM, Gupshup's domain-specific large language model to build AI bots that can handle all kinds of natural language queries while operating within safety guardrails appropriate for a business conversation.

"For our 2023 Switch-off campaign, we leveraged WhatsApp in partnership with Gupshup to amplify the message and engage people through a conversational survey. The results have been quite encouraging, helping us not only connect one-on-one with customers but also gain valuable insights. Gupshup has been a great partner and enabler for us to tap into the power of conversational messaging through this innovative campaign. We wish them good luck on the launch of their Conversation Cloud", said Mayank Prabhakar, Head of Digital Marketing at smartphone maker Vivo's India office.

Gupshup Advertise enables marketers to acquire, qualify, and convert customers by leveraging Click to WhatsApp and Click to Instagram Ads. This significantly enhances new customer acquisition, and campaign ROI while empowering brands to build their first-party database. Brands leveraging Advertise have seen 60-70% lower cost per qualified lead and 1.6X sign-ups compared to traditional channels.

Gupshup Communicate is a significant step up from traditional CPaaS, and has smart capabilities such as Gen-AI powered automatic message translation, optimized scheduling to maximize open rates, and omnichannel message failover, in addition to its pre-existing capability to send messages across 30+ channels.

"The Conversational Internet is among the biggest trends shaking up the customer experience. It is rapidly digitizing the mobile-first countries in emerging markets. Every business and brand will need new tools to build and manage conversational experiences. Gupshup builds on its reputation for innovation by launching the first such comprehensive platform, the Conversation Cloud, that transforms customer experiences and delivers substantial ROI to businesses", said Beerud Sheth,  Co-founder and CEO of Gupshup.

"Messaging continues to emerge as a leading channel for brands to authentically connect with customers, far and wide. We are excited to see partners like Gupshup further enhancing the tools and solutions that will help brands drive even more value in customer interactions", said Ravi Garg, Director, Business Messaging, Meta India.

Designed to assist in the optimization of advertising campaigns across platforms, Admetricks will help cement Similarweb as the comprehensive solution for Advertising Intelligence

Similarweb announced today the acquisition of Admetricks, the creator of powerful ad intelligence software, that is slated to form the core of the new Similarweb Ad Intelligence product. 

Founded in 2012 in Santiago, Chile and best known for empowering brands to advertise more effectively in Latin America, Admetricks will advance Similarweb’s mission of providing the most comprehensive data, analytics, and optimization tools for digital marketing and advertising. Admetricks supports multimillion-dollar ad campaigns, as well as diverse clients with significant growth potential.

“Admetricks’ excellence in display advertising intelligence fits naturally with Similarweb’s strengths, helping customers understand how to refine their media budgets and improve their reach in display advertising among publishers, retail marketplace advertising and digital marketing more broadly,” Similarweb CEO Or Offer said. “We look forward to taking Admetricks’ capabilities global. Their existing customers include both regional and global brands selling into Latin America. We want to support this current book of business while also introducing them to the value of the broader Similarweb platform.”

“We are proud of what we have accomplished in the past decade and of showcasing that software created in Chile’s growing tech community can have worldwide impact,” said Admetricks CEO, Felipe del Sol, who co-founded the company with CTO, Patricio del Sol. “We call our employees ‘data lovers,’ and we are honored to be joining Similarweb’s larger family of digital data lovers who put that value into practice every day. Together we will be able to offer a more comprehensive solution for marketing and advertising across channels.”

Admetricks’ software-as-a-service products include Admetricks Ad Intelligence, which provides estimates of competitor ad spending and results, and Admetricks Media Planner, which assists with planning and budgeting for media campaigns. Clients include many global brands in the automotive, banking, telecommunications, and retail industries, as well as advertising and marketing agencies, publishers, broadcasters, and digital media companies. Admetricks already has technical integration with Similarweb making the acquisition even more seamless, having previously partnered for access to Similarweb data sets.

Similarweb currently offers extensive intelligence for cross-channel performance including search engine advertising and organic SEO, and Admetricks will significantly improve its tools for display advertising. Admetricks will further strengthen Similarweb’s capabilities in analyzing online display advertising, a sector estimated to attract $174.4 billion in spending in 2024, according to Statista.

In addition to forming the basis for a forthcoming advancement to the Similarweb Ad Intelligence product, Similarweb plans to incorporate Admetricks’ analytics into other aspects of the Similarweb Digital Data focused on understanding the overall strength of digital brands as competitors, partners, or investments. “Like Similarweb’s 2022 acquisition of the Rank Ranger SEO platform, we see the addition of Admetricks as adding to Similarweb’s core strengths and allowing us to deliver a more well-rounded solution for marketers, publishers, and advertisers,” said Baruch Toledano, VP and General Manager of Digital Marketing Solutions at Similarweb.

Admetricks will continue to operate as Admetricks, a Similarweb company. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The report, based on data from 602 billion impressions, found playable ads 20x more likely to drive installs than banners in gaming, and UGC ad creative from Liftoff Influence has 20% lower CPI than other video formats

Liftoff, the leading growth acceleration platform for the mobile industry, has unveiled its sixth annual Mobile Ad Creative Index. The report analyzes trends across four key app verticals: gaming, e-commerce, finance, and entertainment. 

With increased competition, the report highlights the need for advertisers to optimize spending across platforms and ad formats. For e-commerce, the cost per install (CPI) on Android is lower across all ad types, with native ads offering the strongest value at $0.65. On iOS, banner ads deliver the most cost-efficient results with a $1.37 CPI. The data also revealed a substantial variance in video ad pricing between platforms, averaging $1.15 on Android versus over twice that at $2.83 on iOS.

The report is based on findings from over 602 billion impressions across 49.4 million clicks and 144 million installs between January 1, 2023, and January 1, 2024.

Key findings include:

For gaming apps, native ads win on iOS, while playables conquer Android

When analyzing the CPI of ad formats across different platforms, native ads proved to be the most cost-effective on iOS at $3.09. In contrast, playables were identified as the best budget-friendly option on Android at $0.60. The cost of playables on Android was less than half the cost of native ads, at $1.22.

For gaming apps, playable ads are 20x more likely to drive installs than banner ads

When it comes to mobile games, ad conversions can be tricky. However, gaming ads with a video or playable element have a much higher chance of driving an install than banner ads. They are 20 times more likely to do so. That said, native and banner ads still generate the most ROI 7 days post-install, with native ads at 20.26% and banner ads at 18.20%. However, the expectations of the game and the genre it belongs to can greatly affect the ROI outcomes.

For e-commerce apps, Android's affordability wins with $0.65 native ads

When it comes to e-commerce advertising on mobile, there are some notable differences in performance and pricing between platforms. Overall, Android ads tend to be cheaper. Specifically for native ad formats, the best rate on Android is $0.65. For iOS, banner ads are the most cost-effective at $1.37. Looking at ad performance, video ads are significantly more likely to drive app installs compared to banners—by as much as 1400%. However, after an app is installed, native and banner ads are better at driving that critical first purchase. Install-to-purchase conversion rates for native and banner ads are over 30%, while video and interstitial ads see lower rates around 16%.

For finance apps, interstitial ads see 18x higher conversion rates compared to banner ads

When it comes to finance apps, there are major discrepancies in performance and pricing between platforms. Specifically looking at average install costs, Android hovered just under $1 across ad formats. However, three out of four formats on iOS exceeded $5, with interstitial ads costing over five times more than Android. For conversion rates, banner ads saw the lowest install likelihood for finance apps, while video and interstitial fared over 15 and 18 times higher, respectively.

UGC holds the key to unlocking advertising ROI

Liftoff's top advertisers are employing user-generated content (UGC) for user acquisition (UA) and retargeting campaigns. UGC ads created by the Liftoff Influence team, which fosters direct relationships with influencers, assists with UGC ad production and scales UGC campaigns, exhibit a 20% lower CPI than other video creatives. Influencer UGC also showed a four times stronger return on advertising spend (ROAS) when tested against brand content, with a 152% increase on average in impression-to-install conversion rates.

Generative AI tools are already transforming ad technology and performance as well, with 91% of organizations expecting their productivity to increase from implementing generative AI, from using AI to source ideas to generating images. "When it comes to creative, the name of the game is efficiency. Leverage Gen AI for faster, more scalable creative ideation and production. On the commercial side, AI automation can help you get sales and operations teams the information they need at unprecedented speeds," said Aidan Quest, Senior Director of Generative AI at Liftoff.

Teikametrics announces premier partnership with Carbon6 as two industry-leading ecommerce companies join forces to help Amazon sellers recover millions of dollars in misallocated ad spend and lost revenue

Teikametrics, the leading AI-powered Marketplace Optimization Platform with over $1B+ in annual ad sales optimized, is thrilled to announce its partnership with Carbon6, the premier all-in-one Amazon growth platform. 

Teikametrics will enhance Carbon6’s offerings with its advanced AI-powered advertising flywheel, while the launch of FBA Reimbursements within Teikametrics will allow Amazon sellers to leverage Carbon6’s Seller Investigators reimbursement solution to reclaim up to 3% of their GMV from one simple, streamlined claims dashboard.

“Great products lead to great partnerships,” said Alasdair McLean-Foreman, CEO of Teikametrics. “Carbon6 has a compelling vision for its industry-leading portfolio of ecommerce tools and services. We’re proud to partner with them to offer their reimbursement tool to our sellers, and we believe that we can offer similarly high value to their sellers with our Marketplace Optimization Platform.”

The partnership offers Teikametrics customers the following benefits:

• Save time: FBA Reimbursements eliminates the need to file and track inventory reimbursement cases manually, and instead provides sellers with a dedicated team of recovery specialists.
• Increase profits: Sellers can reclaim up to 3% of their total revenue through reimbursements owed for lost inventory, damaged products, and more.
• Improve cash flow: Through FBA Reimbursements, sellers can recover funds within three business days of filing, allowing them to continuously reinvest in their Amazon businesses.

“We see a lot of adjacencies with Teikametrics,” said Naseem Saloojee, Cofounder of Carbon6. “Advertising is the lifeblood of Amazon brands, and we believe Teikametrics offers the most comprehensive AI-powered advertising and optimization solution on the market. As our customer bases get more and more value from each others’ solutions, we believe that our companies’ shared vision for marketplace optimization will only get more closely aligned and that our partnership will flourish.”

New or existing Teikametrics customers will have access to a limited-time exclusive offer for Carbon6’s reimbursement tool, Seller Investigators. These sellers will get a free audit and their first $500 in reimbursements commission-free.

New learner engagement marketing capabilities enable training and education leaders to increase credential sharing, program referrals, and growth