Twilio, the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands, today announced that it has appointed Andy Stafman, a partner at Sachem Head Capital Management LP (“Sachem Head”), to the company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately.

“Over the last year and a half, we have made important changes to accelerate our path to profitability and position Twilio to capitalize on the opportunities we see ahead,” said Jeff Epstein, Chair of the Board for Twilio. “We look forward to benefiting from the addition of Andy’s perspectives as an additional shareholder in the boardroom as we continue our strong oversight of the company’s strategy to enhance value for all our stakeholders.”

Khozema Shipchandler, CEO of Twilio, added, “We are operating Twilio with greater focus, rigor, and discipline than ever before, and remain focused on our commitment to drive durable, profitable growth. As we look ahead, we are confident that Twilio is well positioned to unlock the power of AI by converging our data capabilities with our powerful Communications solutions. The Board and I will partner with Andy as we continue to advance our strategy to realize the full potential of the business.”

Twilio plans to hold an investor day within the next twelve months to discuss the company’s strategy in greater detail and to share medium-term financial targets. Twilio will provide more details on the investor day once a date for the event has been set.

“I am excited to join the Twilio Board during an important time for the company,” said Mr. Stafman. “Sachem Head invested in Twilio because of its strong leadership position in the customer engagement market and the significant upside potential from the application of AI. The company has already taken meaningful actions to strengthen Twilio’s profitability and growth trajectory, and I look forward to working with the rest of the Board and management team to build upon that progress and enhance value for shareholders.”

Twilio has entered into a cooperation agreement with Sachem Head. Pursuant to the agreement, Sachem Head has agreed to customary standstill, voting and confidentiality commitments, among other provisions.

With the appointment of Mr. Stafman, Twilio’s Board will increase to 10 directors, nine of whom are independent.

About Andy Stafman

Mr. Stafman is a partner at Sachem Head Capital Management LP, a value-oriented investment management firm based in New York. Prior to Sachem Head, Mr. Stafman worked as an Associate at Silver Lake Partners, a global private equity firm focused on technology-enabled investments. He received a B.S. in Economics, with a concentration in Finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Comscore to Provide Currency-Grade Measurement Metrics for Nexstar’s Local TV, Broadcast, Network, and Digital Businesses

Comscore, Inc. today announced that it has reached a comprehensive multi-year agreement with Nexstar Media Group, Inc. on cross-platform audience measurement. Under the terms of the agreement, Comscore will become a key measurement partner for Nexstar, providing it with critical measurement metrics across Nexstar’s local TV, broadcast, network, and digital businesses.

Comscore has provided local market measurement to Nexstar since 2010, but with continued evolution and innovation in its suite of insights and planning solutions across digital, social, CTV, and linear TV, Nexstar now sees unique opportunities to move Comscore into a leading currency provider position. Together, Comscore and Nexstar will be able to deliver more precise audience insights across screens to help advertisers optimize total reach and measure the holistic cross-platform campaign with de-duplicated in-flight monitoring of key metrics such as reach and frequency, incrementality, and co-viewing.

Comscore, a leading provider of currency-grade television measurement for local TV, provides measurement across all 210 local Comscore Markets. Comscore’s National measurement is the summation of all 210 local markets, establishing Comscore as the foremost authority in comprehensive TV metrics. At the core of Comscore's success is a unified methodology, setting the gold standard in the industry. With local market-level data starting at the household level, building to all 41,704 zip codes, and then seamlessly integrating into and elevating national metrics, Comscore continues to redefine excellence in linear TV measurement.

“Comscore is proud to expand its relationship with Nexstar Media Group to empower Nexstar’s advertisers to unlock optimal reach across key markets and platforms. Nexstar will offer unmatched value to advertisers in a critical election year and beyond, by seamlessly validating its true audience reach with market level precision down to the specific region across linear and digital,” said Comscore Chief Executive Officer Jon Carpenter. “Our partnership demonstrates our ability to eliminate costly ‘make goods’ as Nexstar leverages the strengths of Comscore’s cross-platform solutions to ensure ad dollars are optimized across non-linear mediums to complete incremental reach to what is achieved by linear television.”

“Comscore’s ability to provide us with total audience measurement metrics across our local television stations and websites, NewsNation, The CW Network, and The Hill, enables our cross-platform sales team to leverage our unique scale and reach to customize bespoke advertising and marketing solutions for our clients,” said Michael Biard, Nexstar’s President and Chief Operating Officer. “We look forward to offering our advertisers deeper insight into who is watching and interacting with our programming and when they are doing so, enabling them to focus on the audiences they want to reach.”

All-Inclusive TV advertising agency Marketing Architects introduces Annika Streaming, the first opportunistic rate performance marketplace for streaming TV advertisers.

Streaming TV advertising is taking a step toward the future. This week, TV advertising agency Marketing Architects launched a new platform for CTV advertisers called Annika Streaming. Based on technology initially developed for linear TV, Annika Streaming buys CTV and streaming inventory more efficiently than current marketplace offerings allow. This enables performance brands to capitalize on streaming’s potential.

Annika’s development began six years ago when Marketing Architects built an AI-powered DSP for linear TV. The platform was designed to evaluate custom audience and performance criteria, set it against market trends and historical data, then calculate which media buys will drive the best ROI for individual brands. The result was a linear TV marketplace that delivered premium inventory for TV advertisers without premium price tags.

But as viewership shifted to streaming and connected TV, it was essential brands follow consumers to the channel. Unfortunately for performance marketers, streaming’s promise of advanced targeting and measurement capabilities has been overshadowed by its high prices, typically 5-10X higher than linear TV.

To close this gap, Marketing Architects spent the last two years building a proprietary streaming capability, bringing the efficient prices Annika achieved in linear into streaming and CTV. Now, Annika Streaming solves some of the biggest challenges for performance marketers on the channel.

• Pricing: Annika Streaming obtains rates significantly more efficient than industry-leading third-party DSPs. These are achieved through a data-driven approach that benefits streaming publishers and advertisers alike.
• Targeting: The platform offers several layers of contextual, geographic, and dayparting targeting capabilities, plus retargeting.
• Distribution: Annika is fully integrated with dozens of streaming publishers and buys inventory available on Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Firestick, and smart TVs.
• Measurement: With Annika, advertisers get access to multiple measurement models running in parallel, including IP address tracking and holdout groups for incrementality testing.

SanerNow Risk Prioritization, based on CISA's SSVC framework, builds upon SecPod's well-known vulnerability intelligence to effectively prioritize vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other security risks and improve cybersecurity posture.

SecPod Technologies, a global vulnerability management pioneer, has launched SanerNow Risk Prioritization, AKA SanerNow RP, to assess and prioritize the exponentially rising number of vulnerabilities in organizations. As the world's first SSVC-based risk prioritization solution, it will allow CISOs and IT Security teams to combine business impact, exploitability, vulnerability intelligence, and data analysis to rapidly and effectively prioritize security risks. 

With millions of security risks lurking in modern networks, IT Security teams are often overwhelmed in managing them and effectively mitigating them gets increasingly difficult. Further, remediating every risk is time-consuming and inefficient in effectively combating cyberattacks. With the focus being diverted to low-risk vulnerabilities and ever-increasing backlog, high-risk vulnerabilities that need immediate attention might be missed. Classification and prioritization are the only way to wade through the mountain of vulnerabilities.

Chandrashekhar Basavanna, the CEO of SecPod, said, "We are excited to launch this innovation from SecPod's lab. With every new product we introduce, we are setting a new standard for ourselves. SanerNow RP is a crucial bridge between vulnerability detection and mitigation that helps our Customers streamline their remediation efforts efficiently. SanerNow RP applies machine learning, prediction, kill-chain validation, and in-house vulnerability intelligence to prioritize the vulnerabilities into different priority buckets accurately."

Unlike other solutions that prioritize, SanerNow Risk Prioritization, natively integrated into the SanerNow Advanced Vulnerability Management solution, prioritizes AND mitigates risks that matter the most, providing an unparalleled improvement in vulnerability reduction and security posture. Furthermore, it also eliminates the need for multiple tools to effectively reduce the attack surface.

SanerNow Risk Prioritization is now available to the public as an add-on to SanerNow Advanced Vulnerability Management (AVM) platform to seamlessly simplify and integrate vulnerability management into a simple workflow. SanerNow AVM is a comprehensive vulnerability management platform providing visibility and control over IT infrastructure, detection and prioritization of vulnerabilities, and remediation of the vulnerability within the same platform. 

Latest Platform Release Streamlines Research Process, Expands Asynchronous and Global Recruitment Capabilities

Discuss, the leading purpose-built platform for turning experiences into insights, is changing the game for qualitative research with the latest release of the Discuss People Experience Platform. New features including generative AI-powered research summaries, enhanced asynchronous research tools and an expanded network for global recruitment are eliminating the long, winding road to insights and instead, offer customers a freeway to faster insights.

After introducing the first generative AI suite, Genie, for qualitative research, Genie Summaries was quickly adopted by dozens of Discuss customers who experienced the value of instantaneous recaps of live sessions and summaries across entire research projects. After thousands of summaries and customer feedback that helped further improve Genie summaries, it is now officially out of Beta and generally available for all new and existing customers. It is a step change in how researchers navigate their unstructured feedback allowing users to take hours of video and turn them into a final report in minutes.

“I used Genie for an online focus group project, and seeing the summary I was provided was one of those ‘wow’ moments for me, as I could see how the AI picked up on sentiment expressed through the longer conversation,” said Susan Sweet, Chief Insight Officer for Sweet Insight Group. “I’m excited most about the time savings, but also about the way it takes my own reliance on ‘emotional recollection’ down a notch, and I think it would be incredibly helpful for exploratory, in-depth interviews as well.”

Discuss has also expanded its asynchronous research tools and services to make it easier and faster to reach a global audience. These enhancements help customers optimize all types of research from in-home usage testing to shop-alongs and unboxing moments. Discuss also facilitates the recruitment of respondents for these asynchronous projects through the expansion of its global network of online panels and agency partners.

“This latest release is reflective of how the Discuss team truly obsesses over solving the biggest customer challenges in qualitative research combined with a world class innovation pace. We’re excited to continue pushing the boundaries and be out in front of the market providing our customers with a qualitative research platform that gets more robust almost weekly,” said Adam Mertz, SVP of Product & Marketing at Discuss. “The feedback from our customers and industry experts has been extraordinary in terms of the value of these new capabilities and their enthusiasm for how quickly Discuss has introduced them.” 

This focus on innovation and customer success, along with a unique unlimited research business model that removes the constraints of the past to scaling qual research has led to recognition across the industry for Discuss this year, including being named as a Strong Performer by Forrester in their Experience Research Platforms Wave and also receiving G2 leader recognition in their Recent Summer Grid reports for User Research and Video Feedback with top scores in ease of use, ease of doing business with, and quality of support. Discuss was also named a winner in the Analytics and Business Intelligence category of the 2022 and 2023 APPEALIE SaaS Awards.

Customer and partner announcements showcase momentum in generative AI

Google Cloud announced a series of new customers, partners, and product innovations to help every business, government, and user benefit from generative AI and leading cloud technologies.

"We are in an entirely new era of cloud, fueled by generative AI," said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. "Our focus is on putting gen AI tools into the hands of everyone across the organization—from IT, to operations, to security, to the board room. As the industry's most open cloud, our goal is to help companies use AI and other cloud technologies to streamline their operations, increase productivity, and create entirely new lines of business."

Customer momentum around the world
Organizations across industries and around the world are choosing Google Cloud to digitally transform, and this year we've shared stories from Culture Amp, Deutsche Borse, eDreams ODIGEO, Government of Singapore, HSBC, IHOP, IPG Mediabrands, John Lewis Partnership, The Knot Worldwide, Macquarie Bank, Mayo Clinic, Priceline, Shopify, U.S. Steel, and Wendy's. Today, we are announcing new or expanded relationships with The Estée Lauder Companies, FOX Sports, GE Appliances, General Motors, HCA Healthcare, and more.

Innovative gen AI startups, like Replit, Typeface, Jasper, and more, are increasingly choosing to build on Google Cloud. In fact, today more than half of all funded gen AI startups – including companies like Contextual, CoRover, Elemental Cognition, Fiddler, and Quora are Google Cloud customers. This includes 70% of gen AI unicorns, like AI21, Anthropic, Cohere, Runway, and others.

New infrastructure and tools to help customers
The advanced capabilities and broad applications that make gen AI so revolutionary demand the most sophisticated and capable infrastructure. Today, Google Cloud announced key infrastructure advancements to help customers, including:

• Cloud TPUv5e: This is Google Cloud's most cost-efficient, versatile, and scalable purpose-built AI accelerator to date. Now, customers can use a single Cloud TPU platform to run both large-scale AI training and inferencing.
• A3 VMs with NVIDIA H100 GPU: A3 VMs powered by NVIDIA's H100 GPU will be generally available next month, enabling organizations to achieve three times better training performance over prior generation A2.
• GKE Enterprise: This enables multi-cluster horizontal scaling required for the most demanding, mission-critical AI/ML workloads.
• Cross-Cloud Network: This is a global networking platform that helps customers connect and secure applications across clouds. It is open, workload-optimized, and offers ML-powered security to deliver zero trust.
• Google Distributed Cloud (GDC): GDC is designed to meet the unique demands of organizations that want to run workloads at the edge or in their data centers. The GDC portfolio will bring AI to the edge, with Vertex AI integrations and a new managed offering of AlloyDB Omni on GDC Hosted. 

Vertex AI platform gets even better
On top of Google Cloud's world-class infrastructure, the company delivers a comprehensive AI platform—Vertex AI—that enables customers to build, deploy, and scale machine learning models. Customers have access to more than 100 foundation models, including third-party and popular open-source versions, as well as industry-specific models like Sec-PaLM 2 for cybersecurity and Med-PaLM 2 for healthcare and life sciences. New innovations announced today include:

• Vertex AI Search and Conversation: Now generally available, the tools enable organizations to create Search and Chat applications using their data in just minutes, with minimal coding and enterprise-grade management and security built in.
• PaLM 2, Imagen and Codey Upgrades: This includes updating PaLM 2 to 32k context windows so enterprises can easily process longer form documents like research papers and books.
• Tools for tuning: For PaLM 2 and Codey, Google Cloud is making adapter tuning generally available, and introducing a new method for Imagen, called Style Tuning, so enterprises can create images aligned to brand guidelines with a small amount of reference images.
• New models: Google Cloud is announcing availability of Llama 2 and Code Llama from Meta, and Technology Innovative Institute's Falcon LLM, a popular open-source model, as well as pre-announcing Claude 2 from Anthropic. Google Cloud will be the only cloud provider offering both adapter tuning and RLHF for Llama 2.
• Vertex AI extensions: Developers can access, build, and manage extensions that deliver real-time information, incorporate company data, and take action on the user's behalf.
• Digital Watermarking on Vertex AI: Powered by Google DeepMind SynthID, this is a state-of-the art technology that embeds the watermark directly into the image of pixels, making it invisible to the human eye and difficult to tamper with.
• Colab Enterprise: This managed service combines the ease-of-use of Google's Colab notebooks with enterprise-level security and compliance capabilities, helping data scientists accelerate AI workflows.

From the beginning, Google Cloud designed Vertex AI to give users full control and segregation of their data, code and IP. User prompts and data, as well as user inputs at inference time, are not used to improve our models and are not accessible to other customers.

Duet AI in Workspace and Google Cloud
Google Cloud unveiled Duet AI at I/O in May, introducing powerful new features across Workspace and showcasing developer features such as code and chat assistance in Google Cloud. Today, Google Cloud is making Duet AI in Google Workspace generally available, while expanding the preview capabilities of Duet AI in Google Cloud, with general availability coming later this year.

Workspace is the world's most popular productivity tool, with more than 3 billion users and more than 10 million paying customers who rely on it every day to get things done. With the introduction of Duet AI just a few months ago, Workspace delivered a number of features to make users more productive, like helping write and refine content in Gmail and Google Docs, create original images in Google Slides, turn ideas into action and data into insights with Google Sheets, foster more meaningful connections in Google Meet, and more. New enhancements announced today include:

• Duet AI in Google Meet: Duet AI will take notes during video calls, send meeting summaries, and even automatically translate captions in 18 languages. Duet AI in Meet also today unveiled studio look, studio lighting, and studio sound.
• Duet AI in Google Chat: Users can chat directly with Duet AI to ask questions about their content, get a summary of documents shared in a space, and catch up on missed conversations.

Beyond Workspace, Duet AI can now provide AI assistance across a wide range of Google Cloud products and services—as a coding assistant to help developers code faster, as an expert adviser to help operators quickly troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues, as a data analyst to provide quick and better insights, and as a security adviser to recommend best practices to help prevent cyber threats. Duet AI in Google Cloud announcements include advancements for:

• Software development: Duet AI provides expert assistance across the entire software development lifecycle, enabling developers to stay in flow-state longer by minimizing context switching to help them be more productive. In addition to code completion and code generation, it can assist with code refactoring and building APIs using simple natural language prompts.
• Application and infrastructure operations: Operators can chat with Duet AI in natural language across a number of services directly in the Google Cloud Console to quickly retrieve "how to" information about infrastructure configuration, deployment best practices, and expert recommendations on cost and performance optimization.
• Data Analytics: Duet AI in BigQuery provides contextual assistance for writing SQL queries as well as Python code, generates full functions and code blocks, auto-suggests code completions and explains SQL statements in natural language, and can generate recommendations based on your schema and metadata.
• Accelerating and modernizing databases: Duet AI in Cloud Spanner, AlloyDB and Cloud SQL, helps generate code to structure, modify, or query data using natural language.
• Security Operations: Duet AI is also coming to security products including Chronicle Security Operations, Mandiant Threat Intelligence, and Security Command Center, which can empower security professionals to more efficiently prevent threats, reduce toil in security workflows, and uplevel security talent.

Duet AI was designed using Google's comprehensive approach to help protect customers' security and privacy, as well as Google's AI principles. With Duet AI, your data is your data. User code, user inputs to Duet AI, and recommendations generated by Duet AI will not be used to train any shared models nor used to develop any products.

Simplify analytics at scale with a unified data and AI foundation
Data sits at the center of gen AI, which is why Google Cloud is bringing new capabilities to Google's Data and AI Cloud that will help unlock new insights and boost productivity for data teams. In addition to the launch of Duet AI, which assists data engineers and data analysts across BigQuery, Looker, Spanner, Dataplex, and Google Cloud's database migration tools, other important announcements include:

• BigQuery Studio: A single interface for data engineering, analytics, and predictive analysis, BigQuery Studio helps increase efficiency for data teams.
• AlloyDB AI: An integral part of AlloyDB, our PostgreSQL-compatible database service,  AlloyDB AI offers an integrated set of capabilities for easily building GenAI apps including high-performance and vector queries.
• New Data Cloud Partners: Partners, like Confluent, DataRobot, Dataiku, Datastax, Elastic, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis, SingleStore, and Starburst are all launching new capabilities to help customers accelerate and enhance gen AI development with data.

Addressing top security challenges
Google Cloud is the only leading security provider that brings together the essential combination of frontline intelligence and expertise, a modern security operations platform, and a trusted cloud foundation, all infused with the power of gen AI, to help drive the security outcomes customers are looking to achieve. Today, Google Cloud announced:

• Mandiant Hunt for Chronicle: This service integrates the latest insights into attacker behavior from Mandiant's frontline experts with Chronicle Security Operations' ability to quickly analyze and search security data, helping customers gain elite-level support without the burden of hiring, tooling, and training.
• Agentless vulnerability scanning: These posture management capabilities in Security Command Center detect operating system, software, and network vulnerabilities on Compute Engine virtual machines.
• Network security advancements: Cloud Firewall Plus adds advanced threat protection and next-generation firewall (NGFW) capabilities to our distributed firewall service, powered by Palo Alto Networks; and Network Service Integration Manager allows network admins to easily integrate trusted third-party NGFW virtual appliances for traffic inspection.

Expanding our ecosystem
Google Cloud's ecosystem is already delivering real-world value for businesses with gen AI, and bringing new capabilities, powered by Google Cloud, to millions of users worldwide. Partners are also using Vertex AI to build their own features for customers – including Box, Canva, Salesforce, UKG, and many others. New partner announcements include:

• DocuSign is piloting new gen AI features, built with Vertex AI, for its billion-plus users. This includes a new "smart contract assistant" in DocuSign that can summarize, explain, and answer questions about complex contracts and other documents.
• SAP is building new solutions utilizing SAP data and Vertex AI that will help enterprises apply gen AI to important business use cases, like streamlining automotive manufacturing or improving sustainability.
• Workday's applications for Finance and HR are now live on Google Cloud and they are working with Google Cloud to develop new gen AI capabilities within the flow of Workday, as part of its multicloud strategy. This includes the ability to generate high-quality job descriptions and to bring Google Cloud gen AI to app developers via the skills API in Workday Extend, while helping to ensure the highest levels of data security and governance for customers' most sensitive information.

Partnership Will Enable OneValley to Provide Up to 1.1M Entrepreneurial Users with Algorithmic-Driven Web Content Scored for Reliability and Personalized to Help Them Grow Their Business

Seekr, a revolutionary artificial intelligence company specializing in transparent content evaluation, announced today it has entered into a strategic partnership with OneValley, a Silicon Valley-based global entrepreneurship platform that powers many of the world's top innovation, entrepreneurial and non-profit ecosystems. The partnership integrates Seekr's groundbreaking search capabilities into OneValley's information-sharing platform, enabling 1.1 million entrepreneurial users supported by OneValley to access algorithmic-driven news that is personalized and scored for reliability.

"The OneValley platform is already a treasure trove of high-value information for entrepreneurs, providing guidance and insights on everything from ideation and launch to growth and scaling. Seekr's content evaluation capabilities amplify that value proposition, taking the platform to the next level," said Rob Clark, President and Chief Technology Officer at Seekr. "Our technology enables the OneValley platform to identify relevant information, regardless of whether it lives on the platform or on the broader internet, score it for reliability, curate it so that it's tailored to the unique needs and interests of each individual entrepreneur, and finally serve it up to the entrepreneur on-demand."

"As OneValley continues to expand worldwide, this unique partnership with Seekr will provide our customers with the knowledge they need to win in their markets," said Nikhil Sinha, CEO of OneValley. "We further expect that usage on the platform will continue to grow and enhance the life cycle growth from startup to big business."

Seekr's AI-powered search and evaluation technology will be fully integrated into OneValley's online consumer platform, Passport, and its enterprise platform, PassportOS. The technology will enable every OneValley user to generate a bespoke flow of news and other relevant content tailored to meet their unique individual interests and needs.

Under the terms of the agreement, the platform will also feature a stream of real-time news and relevant information powered by Seekr. Additionally, Seekr will provide OneValley with a dynamic competitive analysis tool that provides entrepreneurs and startups with insights into competitor movements and a fuller understanding of how market trends are moving over time.