Additional Funding, backed by Intel Capital and Comcast Ventures, Advances AI Systems for Enterprise

AI21, a leader in AI systems for enterprise, announced today the completion of its $208 million Series C funding at a valuation of $1.4 billion. Participation from additional new investors includes Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel Corporation, and Comcast Ventures, the venture capital arm of Comcast Corporation, which joined previously announced investors. This new round of funding brings the company's total capital raised to $336 million, accelerating AI21's purpose-driven approach in the era of AI-first enterprises.

"A multi-disciplinary approach is needed to deliver AI to the end user," said Anthony Lin, Corporate Vice President and Head of Intel Capital. "The AI21 full-stack offering combines foundation models with successful applications and operation tools that will help enterprises accelerate GenAI adoption to increase productivity and affect their bottom and top line."

"We are impressed with the strong team at AI21 and their ability to scale quickly in a rapidly evolving Generative AI landscape," said Allison Goldberg, SVP and Managing Partner, Comcast Ventures and Startup Engagement. "We look forward to seeing how AI21 will deliver enterprise solutions to strategically leverage this technology in a way that is meaningful and reliable."

"We're extremely grateful for the support of our investors who believe in our deep technology expertise. This funding will enable AI21 to increase mindshare that one size doesn't fit all, as enterprises look for unique partners that understand their specific needs. Mass deployment of AI requires deep understanding of high-performance language models that can deliver better value and impact. Our approach is about designing AI with purpose, making it significantly more efficient than building from scratch, and much more cost effective," said Ori Goshen, co-CEO and co-founder of AI21.

Task Specific Models Approach to Enterprise AI
General-purpose models, LLMs are a 'jack of all trades', built to offer unprecedented versatility and capable of tackling a broad variety of use cases and NLP tasks. In practice, enterprise customers only need a small number of NLP tasks to support an umbrella of business use cases. This means that enterprise customers are paying for capabilities they don't need, while also dealing with reliability issues due to output hallucinations or confabulations and other nonsensical blunders caused by the lack of focus in LLM design.

AI21 Studio is a platform that provides API access to developers and businesses with top-tier natural language processing (NLP) solutions powered by AI21's state-of-the-art language models. The platform's Task-Specific Models, optimized Language Models (LLMs), are specifically engineered to excel in distinct natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. These models not only showcase exceptional performance in accuracy but also effectively reduce hallucinations, ensuring heightened reliability. Beyond their reliability, these Task-Specific Models cater to enterprises' diverse needs, covering prevalent NLP capabilities such as contextual answers, summarization, and more. This versatility positions AI21 Studio as a comprehensive solution, offering top-tier NLP tools for a wide range of applications. For example, AI21's Contextual Answers model, specifically designed for grounded question answering, is used by customers such as Clarivate, an analytics company, and One Zero digital bank to answer user queries using information based entirely on the organization's body of data.

LLMs to AI Systems
AI21 is one of the few companies in the world that combines the development of proprietary large language models for enterprises with application development for consumers. AI21 achieves this through a neuro-symbolic architecture that combines large language models, external knowledge sources, and discrete reasoning.

"We will see an increasing shift in discussion to AI Systems that will define the next era in computing. By adopting a more comprehensive systems approach, our AI enriches LLMs with knowledge and reasoning, in addition to statistical inference. This enables us to define a flexible architecture with multiple LLMs, complemented by discrete knowledge and reasoning modules," said Prof. Yoav Shoham, co-founder and co-CEO, AI21.

85% of consumers aren't interested in using AI for purchases

Storyblok, the content management system (CMS) category leader, today announced the results of a global survey of 1,000 consumers that reveals the content they trust and reject when making purchases this holiday season.

Websites are more important than apps and social media

A majority of consumers (43%) said a brand's website is more valuable than its mobile app (34%) or social media accounts (16%). Only 7% said email is the most valuable marketing channel.

70% of shoppers primarily use a smartphone for online shopping, highlighting the need for brands to offer mobile-optimized web experiences instead of simply relying on apps.

Previous Storyblok research proves that businesses still aren't doing enough to improve their websites. The data shows that e-commerce companies are losing out on billions in revenue because 60% of consumers abandon purchases due to poor website user experience. Businesses know they have a problem: 48% are embarrassed by their websites.

Consumers don't trust AI with their money

85% aren't interested in using AI to help them decide on purchases. Additionally, if offered an AI recommendation, 60% said it wouldn't make them more likely to buy something, while 17% said it would make them less likely to make a purchase.

Influencers aren't so influential

Brands may be better off spending their marketing budgets on campaigns that don't involve influencers. 57% of consumers said a celebrity or influencer endorsement wouldn't make them more likely to purchase a product, with 24% saying it would make them less likely to buy.

Consumers rely on content to build brand loyalty

Only 5% said they're more likely to purchase new brands instead of brands they trust. At the same time, 90% said content produced by brands is important in shaping their perception of brands and their products. Prioritizing the creation of modern content experiences helps brands build trust that turns consumers into customers.

Dominik Angerer, CEO and Co-Founder of Storyblok, said: "It's easy for brands to fall into the trap of chasing the latest trends instead of giving people what they actually want. As these survey results show, consumers have authentic content and useful websites on their wish list this holiday season."

The new and expanded data-driven solutions are designed to enhance audience targeting across channels

Nexxen, a global, unified advertising technology platform with deep expertise in video and Connected TV (“CTV”), today announced the launch of TV Viewership Audiences across the United Kingdom, as well as the expansion of its broader TV Intelligence offering in the United States – a suite of targeting, planning and measurement capabilities, rooted in contextual and exclusive automatic content recognition (“ACR”) data. Both the launch and expansion are the result of the consolidation and integration of TV targeting and measurement solutions into the company’s Nexxen Discovery platform and demand-side platform (“DSP”).

As consumer preferences evolve and streaming services continue to gain traction, particularly in the U.K., advertisers must adapt to effectively reach and engage audiences across linear and streaming platforms. Built to enable brands to reach and measure audiences with precision and scale, Nexxen’s TV Viewership Audiences leverages exclusive ACR data to create custom segments based on linear and streaming behaviours, in line with the fast-changing media landscape.

It is one of three key pillars within Nexxen’s TV Intelligence offering, which include:

• TV Planning & Insights – Proprietary planning tools that help solve the challenge of who to reach and where to reach them across linear and streaming environments
• TV Viewership Audiences (also known as TV Activations) – Robust TV targeting offerings that deliver precise, representative and scalable reach leveraging TV viewership data, in-content-based attributes or media adjacency within linear, CTV and over-the-top (“OTT”)
• TV Measurement – A blend of in-house and partner-supported measurement solutions that tie campaign activation to marketing goals across linear, CTV and digital

Together, these solutions offer a boon to advertising clients who want to extend their reach across CTV and digital screens as well as those who want to understand the impact of their linear and digital campaigns on key business outcomes (e.g., tune-in, foot traffic, conversions, actions). TV Planning and Insights and TV Measurement are both expected to launch in the U.K. in 2024.

"In a world where every screen is a potential touchpoint, Nexxen is offering the compass and map to navigate the evolving landscape of TV viewership,” said Jessica La Rosa, Vice President, TV Partnerships and Strategy at Nexxen. “Through our expanded TV Intelligence solutions and TV Viewership Audiences launch in the U.K., we’re setting a new benchmark for precision and insight in cross-platform advertising."

Platform enables event marketers to explore and compare over 160K events, access event insights for sales planning, and increase ROI

Vendelux, the first AI-powered event intelligence platform, today announced it raised a $14 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital with participation from Cervin Ventures, the founders of HLTH, ShopTalk, Money20/20 (Jonathan Weiner), Manifest, Blueprint (Jay Weintraub), and SaaStock (Alex Theuma). Today’s funding enables Vendelux to expand its work with enterprise customers including PayPal, MongoDB, Calendly, T-Mobile, and others.

Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive modeling, Vendelux’s platform enables event marketers and CMOs to analyze customer and competitor behavior, make informed decisions about which events to attend or sponsor, and ultimately, close more customers to increase ROI. With 65 million data points from over 160,000 global events, and deep CRM integrations, Vendelux’s data-driven solution delivers an industry first: quantifiable business impact of in-person events, tradeshows, and conferences worldwide.

“Events are the most important piece of the marketing and sales funnel, but it’s not always clear which events deliver the greatest return on dollars spent. With teams operating off of different metrics - meetings, deals, speaking opportunities, etc. - it’s no wonder the success is so difficult to define,” said Alex Reynolds, CEO and co-founder, Vendelux. “Year after year, Stefan and I saw firsthand the challenges of evaluating which events were worthwhile to attend or invest in. We built Vendelux to solve those very challenges. Vendelux delivers the ability to both plan for and measure ROI so that, organization-wide, companies have an understanding of the truly massive impact events have on their business.”

With this funding Vendelux will expand its geographic footprint, product development, and customer segments. Vendelux plans to more than double its team by the end of 2024 including building out a London-based team. UK-based events serve enterprises across EMEA and Vendelux’s GDPR compliant insights make it easy to adopt the platform. The product investments will see the Vendelux platform grow to connect the entire end-to-end journey of event marketers as they plan, execute on, and evaluate their event strategies. Vendelux also plans to build out intelligence solutions for conference organizers after receiving feedback from many marquee organizers that are existing customers and investors.

“The Vendelux team is defining a new category in event intelligence. Their customers’ success with the product demonstrates what is possible when you introduce robust data infrastructure to a critical customer acquisition channel for the first time. We were blown away by feedback received from both global enterprise customers and rapidly growing mid-market companies alike,” said Amish Jani, Founder and Partner, FirstMark Capital. “Vendelux is accelerating at the exact right moment, seizing the best of artificial intelligence’s capabilities to deliver data-driven insights that don’t exist anywhere else.”

SKAN 4's elongated attribution timeframe resulted in a 37% improvement in CPAs and 220% in CVRs for apps in TikTok's beta testing

Leading measurement and analytics company Adjust, in partnership with TikTok, today released Mastering SKAN 4: The essentials for iOS success to arm mobile marketers with the knowledge to scale SKAdNetwork (SKAN) campaigns on iOS. From beta tests of 37 apps across the US, UK and Japan, TikTok found that SKAN 4's elongated 35-day attribution window – in contrast to SKAN 3's 1-3 day window – has led to a higher volume of recorded conversions, facilitating a more comprehensive and precise evaluation of campaign effectiveness. When considering all additional conversion values and their impact on performance results, TikTok saw an overall improvement of 37% in cost per acquisition and a remarkable 220% improvement in conversion rates.

"Mobile app marketers are eager to refine their iOS campaign measurement and optimization strategies with privacy-centric attribution, but there's still hesitancy about moving to SKAN 4," said Katie Madding, Chief Product Officer at Adjust. "With the continued industry shift toward prioritizing user and data privacy, now is the time for a shift in mindset toward the possibilities of post-ID attribution on iOS. The data-backed insights detailed in our guide empower growth marketers to dig into and embrace SKAN 4's functionality."

Adjust's ebook details how to leverage SKAN 4's new features to maximize campaign visibility and performance on iOS, diving into use cases for different verticals and business models. It also reveals how TikTok and Adjust support SKAN 4 functionality and explores:

• SKAN 4's major features and how they work on a technical level. These include three attribution windows (and additional postbacks), fine and coarse conversion values, shift from campaign ID to source ID, lockWindow, web-to-app attribution, and more flexibility with decreasing conversion values.
• How to make the switch from SKAN 3 to SKAN 4. Most importantly, marketers can run SKAN 3 and SKAN 4 simultaneously and don't need to do anything to actively start receiving SKAN 4 postbacks. Adjust and TikTok detail key steps to build a SKAN 4 strategy to start leveraging its features for more granular measurement and growth.
• Unlocking SKAN 4's strategic potential. Marketers can learn how to set up and map conversion values in the most effective way, as well as optimize campaigns for maximum crowd anonymity.

New feature delivers continuous monitoring and rating of 100+ million web domains, CTV and mobile apps assigning a high, medium, or low MFA risk assessment

Pixalate, the global market-leading ad fraud protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform, today announced the launch of  “Made for Advertising” (MFA) technology to detect and block MFA websites, CTV and mobile apps. Pixalate’s MFA solution rates websites, CTV and mobile apps with a high, medium, or low MFA risk; this new feature is available in Beta across the Pixalate product suite. 

Pixalate’s MFA detection technology models historical open programmatic transaction data across all apps, pages and URLs; an October 2023 MFA Pixalate assessment deemed over 15K MFA websites and apps high risk. MFA websites and apps can feature intrusive advertising techniques like pop-up ads, auto-play videos, or ads restricting access to content, often resulting in a poor advertising-to-attention ratio. 

With the release of this new feature, Pixalate addresses the nuances of MFA in CTV and mobile apps by incorporating metrics beyond ad refresh and ad density to include the age of the app, invalid traffic (IVT) rates, user ratings, and popularity rankings. Pixalate uses statistical techniques such as Univariate/Multivariate Descriptive and Gaussian curve analysis to assign high, medium, or low MFA risk to websites, CTV, and mobile apps.

Pixalate's MFA risk assessment technology uses the following data points, enabling ad buyers to adjust their MFA risk threshold: 

Connected TV App MFA Risk Definition and Criteria  

• MFA Risk: Pixalate's assessment of the risk (High, Medium or Low) of the CTV app being deemed MFA 
  • Ad Refresh Rate: Number of ad impressions observed per device, per hour
  • Age:  Age of the app on the App Store
  • IVT: IVT% of the App across regions
  • Popularity Score: Pixalate’s popularity score for the app 
  • Reviews: Number of Reviews 

Mobile App MFA Risk Definition and Criteria 

• MFA Risk: Pixalate's assessment of the risk (High, Medium or Low) of the mobile app being deemed MFA
  • Ad Refresh Rate: Number of ad impressions observed per device per hour
  • Age:  Age of the app on the App Store
  • IVT: IVT% of the app across regions
  • Popularity: Pixalate’s popularity score for the app 
  • Reviews: Number of Reviews 

Website MFA Risk Definition and Criteria

• MFA Risk: Pixalate’s assessment of the risk (High, Med or Low) of the website being deemed MFA 
  • Ad Density Rate: Number of ad placements observed per device, per minute 
  • Ad Refresh Rate: Number of ad impressions observed per device, per minute
  • Paid Traffic Rate: Volume of traffic sourced via paid (ad) sources
  • Social Traffic Rate: Volume of traffic sourced via social media

Examples of Made for Advertising in Websites, CTV and Mobile Apps: 

MFA Mobile App Example: MFA observed by Pixalate in mobile app shows ads blocking the apps’ content, promoting unqualified clicks from users therefore impeding the implied app functionality.

MFA CTV App Example: Pixalate observed a MFA CTV app presenting small thumbnail-sized video ads instead of full-screen ads. The videos run back-to-back, muted, and constantly in a corner of the screen overlaid on the intended CTV content. 

MFA Website Example: The example MFA website met Pixalate’s criteria for MFA based on the number of ad placements, ad refresh rate, and traffic source types.

MFA Detection and Real-time Blocking:

• MFA Blocking Technology: Distinct Data Feeds for MFA mobile apps, CTV apps, and websites
  • Segmented by medium- and high-risk
  • Available via API or FTP for high performance and low latency 
• MFA Risk Assessment in the Media Ratings Terminal: Pixalate’s ad supply chain intelligence tool, the Media Ratings Terminal (MRT), now includes MFA risk assessments 
• MFA Reports in Analytics Dashboard: Pixalate’s post-bid analytics dashboard will provide clients insight into the impact of MFA websites and apps on their first-party traffic
• MFA insights via APIs: The Enrichment API within Pixalate’s self-service Ad Trust and Safety API suite now includes MFA insights associated with the websites, mobile and CTV apps. Insights include the overall MFA Risk rating and the details impacting MFA risk such as Ad Density, Ad Refresh Rate, App Age, Paid Traffic, etc.

Workorb, a Toronto-based team of AI researchers and engineers, launches the platform to democratize access to enterprise customer data.

Workorb launches the first platform that combines keyword-based information retrieval, embedding-based document retrieval, and enterprise conversation graphs for highly accurate retrieval and objective-driven information task deployments in enterprises.

Founded in 2022, the company is a venture-backed team of AI researchers and engineers based in Toronto.The company has the product deployed across a number of enterprises as design partners.

Workorb, an enterprise software provider for customer facing teams, has successfully launched its platform to democratize access to enterprise customer data. Customer data in an enterprise environment is siloed and spread across systems of record for each enterprise team, emails, internal chat messages, cloud storage and transcribed phone calls. Getting answers to queries about a customer is time consuming both for customer facing teams in sales and customer success as well as for business leaders.

Workorb connects seamlessly to enterprise systems and stitches together all customer data across channels creating unique customer timelines. It automatically constructs representations of people on the customer side and on the enterprise size as well as their associations and titles. This effectively constitutes an enterprise graph of relationships for each customer which is also indexed by time.

The enterprise graph along with customer timelines are processed in this new platform that combines both traditional and neural indexing along with timelines and people to generate superior representations of customer data. Users can ask open ended questions on the data and obtain detailed answers along with all suitable enterprise information grounding the answer. The platform supports sophisticated data governance policies and novel data sharing approaches to provide secure and regulated access to client information.

The 'Ready with RISE on AWS bundle' provides game-changing cloud migration services to clients' SAP transformation journeys

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SoftwareOne Holding AG, a global provider of end-to-end software and cloud technology solutions, today announced a new collaborative initiative to help customers transition to RISE with SAP on an AWS cloud environment. Called the Ready for RISE on AWS bundle, it combines SoftwareOne's deep SAP advisory and implementation knowledge with AWS technologies to expedite a client's SAP transformation journey.

The collaboration comes at a time when there is growing pressure on organisations to decide how to modernise their SAP environments driven in part by the end of mainstream support for SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) in 2027. Despite the imminent deadline, many organisations are still confused as to which path to take, including when to adopt RISE with SAP, SAP's bundled offering of cloud solutions, infrastructure, and services that helps migrate SAP ERP to the cloud.

"A stable, efficient, and cost-effective environment for consultants and programmers is one of the most important priorities of our daily work. Thanks to the migration of our SAP systems to the AWS cloud with the help of SoftwareOne, GAVDI Polska has achieved all the goals set for this process," says Ireneusz Hołowacz, Director of Application Development Center at GAVDI Polska.

In a survey recently conducted by SoftwareOne with Americas' SAP Users' Group (ASUG) - the full details of which will be revealed in January 2024 - showed that while 42% of respondents were familiar with RISE with SAP, 40% had heard of it but weren't familiar with the details and 18% had never heard of it. Over half (52%) said they were still unsure how RISE with SAP would impact their existing relationship with cloud service providers.

"SAP customers have implemented some of the most comprehensive and complex enterprise systems in the industry and moving them to cloud services like AWS requires many important decisions to be made to optimise these investments," says Joshua Greenbaum, Principal at EAC. "SoftwareOne's extensive experience in the SAP ecosystem, combined with its unique capabilities around system rationalisation, cost containment, contracts and licences, and cloud service management, among others, will provide customers deploying on AWS with the ability to make the most of RISE on SAP and other SAP offerings. Ready for RISE on AWS is an important offering for SAP customers at this critical moment in their business transformations."

The Ready for RISE on AWS bundle will help clients understand their SAP transformation options and offer a comprehensive solution to organisations who consider RISE with SAP. It includes advisory data preparation, conversion services, data and AI, cloud innovation platform, supporting the entire journey to RISE on AWS. Clients will benefit from accelerated Return on Investment (ROI), optimal data management, and cost-saving strategies while laying the foundation for ongoing innovation and long-term business success.

"As a valued AWS Premier Consulting Partner, AWS is- working closely with SoftwareOne to offer SAP customers comprehensive assistance through each step of their journey to RISE with SAP on AWS.  SoftwareOne's ability to bundle Advisory, Data & AI, Cloud Platform, and Operations considerations can be of high interest to customers who are seeking to understand RISE with SAP as well as the cloud native and operation considerations that surround and support the RISE with SAP construct" says Matt Schwartz, Worldwide Director, SAP Alliance & Partner Network at AWS.

"There are many choices available to SAP clients who know they need to modernise but aren't sure of the best option, particularly given the business-critical nature of the applications," says PF Grillet, SAP Business Lead at SoftwareOne. "All of our services are centered around our customers and what is right for them. This includes supporting and optimising RISE with SAP in scenarios when it's the right decision based on their requirements. Our extensive knowledge of and relationship with AWS means we can help them better prepare and achieve a seamless transition to S/4HANA using RISE with SAP on AWS with reduced costs and risks. This collaboration goes beyond preparing businesses for change; it's making transformation and becoming innovation-ready a reality using AWS technologies."

The offering includes SNP tooling to reduce a customer's data footprint and accelerate migration. SoftwareOne will migrate selected data to an AWS data lake, accelerate innovation readiness and ensure SAP data is suitable for broader data analytics and AI use cases. Clients gain access to innovative tools like AWS' Sagemaker for Machine Learning, continuous data management and optimisation within the AWS environment. The AWS innovation platform also includes Amazon Bedrock that helps organisations accelerate adapting Large Language Models and deploying GenAI use cases that leverage the extended data set.

"While the future innovation opportunities are exciting, clients need to balance these with a pragmatic approach to costs," explains Brian Duffy, CEO at SoftwareOne. "We integrate 'Cost-Out' recommendations into the core of our services, providing a more cost-effective solution for customers, like reducing the data footprint size and optimising storage and archiving. Our expertise in the complexities of SAP licensing further drives cost savings while our FinOps capabilities enable customers to optimise their AWS cloud spend and effectively manage their AWS cloud environment, ensuring full transparency in their budgets. The overall result is a significantly reduced time for RISE migration, which translates into a quicker time to value."