Comm100 has acquired the Credit Union book of business from Atando Technologies, marking a strategic and significant milestone in Comm100's commitment to the Credit Union market.

Comm100, a leading provider of omnichannel customer engagement software, is thrilled to announce the acquisition of the Credit Union book of business from Atando Technologies. This strategic move not only marks a significant milestone in Comm100's growth journey, but also reaffirms its continuing commitment to the Credit Union market.

With this acquisition, Comm100 extends its portfolio within the financial services sector, leveraging its long-standing partnership with Atando Technologies. The consolidation includes a diverse range of credit unions, further demonstrating Comm100's investment in and dedication to the sector. Comm100 is committed to bringing additional resources, expertise, and leading omnichannel technology to meet and exceed the evolving needs of its Credit Union clients.

Clients of the acquired Credit Union book can look forward to enhanced support and an expanded suite of services from Comm100. Each client has been assigned a dedicated Account Manager and Customer Success Manager (CSM) to ensure a smooth transition and maintain the high standards of service excellence these clients have come to expect. The integration will also include continued regular reporting and personalized support to address any concerns.

"We are extremely excited to be acquiring Atando's Credit Union portfolio", explained Tony Sandhu, VP of Global Customer Success at Comm100. "We've been partners with Atando since 2019 and this is a great opportunity for us to deepen our direct expertise within the Credit Union market."

Previously a part of Monigle Inc., Beam will now go to market as its own entity, poised for explosive growth

Today, Monigle, the 52-year-old Denver-based branding agency, officially announced that Beam, the company’s SaaS brand management platform, will become a standalone company. 

Beam was originally created over 12 years ago as a solution for Monigle’s clients to deploy their brand assets. As it evolved over the ensuing dozen years, Beam became one of the world’s top brand enablement platforms providing myriad benefits, empowering marquee clients likes Salesforce, Peloton, Cigna, Optum, Aon, Schneider Electric, Stanford University Hospital, UC Health, S&P, and Deloitte, among many others, to enable their employees and other stakeholders to manifest their brands consistently and authentically.

“We’ve always taken great pride in what we built with Beam, and now it’s time to take it to the next level and enable the team to realize the full potential of this incredible organization. By allowing Beam to be a standalone company, Beam can seek outside investment, create new and unique partnerships, and build a next-generation platform, guided by some of the brightest minds in the community. We’ll maintain an investment in Beam’s success and look forward to continuing to partner with them on many client engagements,” said Gunnar Jacobs, Principal at Monigle.

Monigle will continue to play a role in Beam’s success, funding the company with an initial multimillion dollar investment to support Beam’s ongoing investment in services, technology, and people. In the past year, Beam has welcomed a significant number of new talent to the team.

Guiding Beam is CEO and Denver-based veteran tech executive Steve Foster. Foster was previously co-founder and chairman at Convercent (acquired by OneTrust), former president and CEO of the Colorado Technology Association, and current executive advisor at ForceMetrics, among many other notable roles.

“Joining Beam was a clear choice to me. This is a team that’s dedicated, motivated, and excited to grow quickly. Since day one, I could tell that Beam has got what it takes to propel the category forward. I’m appreciative for what Monigle has built over these past few years with Beam. I am excited to now build on that past success and grow Beam as its own independent software business, delivering even more value to our customers. Launching as a standalone company gives Beam the freedom to operate as a SaaS software provider, delivering faster growth, increased value, and more delighted customers,” said Foster.

The team at Beam currently has over 45 full-time employees and will maintain its Denver, Colorado headquarters. Beam expects to continue hiring in key positions over the next 12 months.

Recognized as a leader for its vision, innovation, and customer and partner ecosystem as organizations globally embrace privacy practices as a competitive advantage 

OneTrust, the market-defining leader for trust intelligence, today announced it has received a significant number of industry recognitions over the last six months for its OneTrust Privacy & Data Governance Cloud.

The OneTrust Privacy & Data Governance Cloud empowers security, marketing, and privacy teams to go beyond compliance, unlocking the full potential of their data to drive business value. By seamlessly discovering, precisely controlling, and proactively activating data, organizations ensure its responsible use across the board. This commitment to safeguarding personal data, exemplified by the world's most valuable and strongest brands, fosters trust among customers, employees, and stakeholders, thereby strengthening ethical data practices and fueling a culture of innovation. Amidst expanding regulatory frameworks, the imperative to build robust first-party datasets, and the ethical management of data-intensive AI models, data privacy becomes paramount. This convergence underscores the critical importance of prioritizing data privacy efforts to navigate today's data-centric landscape effectively. 

Highlights of industry recognition for the OneTrust Privacy & Data Governance Cloud include:

• Recognized as the "Market Leader" in the 2024 Data Governance Compass report from KuppingerCole Analyst AG¹ with the highest ratings across all product criteria, including Security, Functionality, Deployment, Interoperability, and Usability. Noting OneTrust's "enterprise scale solution capable of handling billions of data transfers" and "extensive connectivity and adaptability," the KuppingerCole Leadership Compass highlighted several key strengths the OneTrust Privacy and Data Governance Cloud delivers, including policy enforcement and remediation with data-level actions, agile development, and simplified "one-click" deployment on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The report also highlighted integration options for the OneTrust DataGuidance research library, the world's largest regulatory research platform, to identify regulatory requirements and convert them into rules to automate compliance policies.
• Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Privacy Management Software, Q4 2023.² The report evaluated the 11 most significant privacy management software providers, considering current offering, strategy, and market presence. OneTrust received the highest scores possible in 17 criteria, including Breadth of Software, Vision, Adoption, Support and Customer Service, Revenue, Number of Customers, Roadmap, Individual Consent, Third-Party Risk Management, Personal Data Classification, Partner Ecosystem, and Integration. The report also recognized OneTrust with the highest score in the Strategy category, noting, "OneTrust differentiates with an unrivaled vision for the future of privacy."
• Positioned as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Data Privacy Compliance Software 2023 Vendor Assessment.³ The report evaluated critical product success factors such as dynamic consent management, automated data discovery and classification, and advanced AI capabilities. OneTrust was recognized for the breadth of its platform and enterprise scale. The IDC MarketScape states that "OneTrust is a one-stop shop for data privacy compliance." Furthermore, OneTrust has been ranked #1 for 2022 market share in IDC's latest Worldwide Data Privacy Compliance Software Market Shares report⁴ titled, OneTrust Continues to Hold Its Large Lead Over the Market, making it the fourth consecutive year of market leadership.
• Named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Data Governance Solutions, Q3 2023.⁵ The report evaluated the seven most significant providers, considering current offering, strategy, and market presence. "OneTrust offers an intuitive platform, an extensive global regulatory research database, and access to in-house researchers and experts who guide their clients through the ever-changing data regulation environment. The ability to discover and manage unstructured data as part of its core offering stands out," stated the report. OneTrust also received the highest scores possible in the Innovation, Vision, Policy Management, and Partner Ecosystem criteria.

"OneTrust was founded on the belief that data privacy builds trust and drives business value, and since then the company has helped thousands of businesses, big and small, automate their privacy programs. The case has never been clearer for organizations to implement the proper solutions to help automate privacy compliance, enforce strong data governance policies, and offer consumers transparency and choice over the use of their data," said Ojas Rege, General Manager, Privacy & Data Governance at OneTrust. "We believe our strong momentum validates our vision that the responsible use of data is a strategic enabler of trust and innovation. With widespread generative AI adoption, understanding and managing data privacy risks within AI will be essential to promoting responsible use, complying with regulations, and ensuring people's data and privacy rights remain protected."

Flowfinity Inc., creators of a highly flexible no-code data management and visualization platform, has introduced new capabilities to help users unlock real-time insights into operations. Flowfinity is a leader in process automation and industrial IoT solutions embraced by operations managers and IT professionals to design and deploy business management applications and automate workflows.

Organizations can react faster to problems with Flowfinity operational intelligence dashboards that offer real-time insights into both the digital and physical worlds so users can make better-informed, data-driven decisions. Now, those dashboards include a customizable task scheduler and calendar for increased productivity by improving time management and collaboration so teams can better organize their work and resources.

"Flowfinity dashboards were designed to provide a live view of your business processes, allowing managers to visualize performance in real-time. This immediate visibility helps you react faster by identifying issues as they arise, rather than after the fact," said Alex Puttonen, Marketing Manager at Flowfinity. "The addition of the scheduler tool allows for greater productivity and is the only task and resource management tool that integrates seamlessly with your Flowfinity workflows while retaining the ability to add information from other apps and customizable to meet to your unique needs."

Users can easily synchronize their Flowfinity calendar with email and device calendars using iCal notifications or send automated system-generated emails to create and update events to help teams stay on task and on track. 

For those that need automated 24/7 monitoring of facilities and equipment it's now possible to view high-volume IoT sensor data in a time-series visualization leveraging Flowfinity Streams. This helps to identify performance issues and trigger automated alerts or interventions, improving reliability and productivity on the production floor or at your remotely monitored facilities.

Flowfinity Operational Intelligence dashboards are essential for businesses seeking to improve visibility into operations. They enable real-time monitoring, enhance decision-making, improve efficiency, provide data-driven insights, and foster collaboration to reduce reaction time and provide competitive advantage.

Extending Alation’s lineage capabilities, business lineage provides a visual map of the technical, system, and business metadata of data as it flows across systems

Alation, Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced business lineage to provide business users with broad and rich visibility into data’s journey as it flows and transforms through systems. This visibility increases trust in the data and accelerates time to insights. Business lineage is an extension of Alation’s end-to-end data lineage, providing an abstraction layer to filter views of data flows and visualize relationships across technical, system, and business metadata. This unified approach offers a complete view so that all users can confidently and effectively harness information to unlock the full potential of an organization’s information assets for improved decision-making.

AI and cloud technologies have provided opportunities for organizations to enhance their products, services, and business models using their enterprise data. However, the increasing number of data sources has intensified data fragmentation and data silos, making it difficult to use data effectively. This complicates tracing data origins and understanding how it is transformed across its lifecycle. IDC reports that 41% of organizations believe that data is changing faster than they can keep up with, and 33% believe data is disaggregated or siloed across the organization, preventing the ability to extract more value from data. 64% of these organizations also believe that the volume of metadata is growing faster or significantly faster than raw data is created or collected. Organizations need lineage to provide users with this end-to-end view and certify data trust.

The Alation Data Intelligence Platform provides deep and broad connectivity to over 100 data sources providing a unified view of data, abstracted and exposed via rich metadata. This gives organizations a comprehensive map of their data environment and flexible ways to visualize the end-to-end data flows at either the business or technical level through a single-pane-of-glass. It enables users to apply various filters to uncover more details, such as technical code references or data health indicators, to accelerate time to insights. This approach helps less technical users, such as business analysts, understand data issues and track metrics across systems to uncover data quality issues without the need to write queries. With lineage, users can instantaneously certify the trust of a dashboard and quickly conduct quality checks to ensure that data is endorsed and trusted.

“Alation's actionable, end-to-end business lineage serves both business and technical personas in the organization, helping them to understand the flow of their data from the initial point of capture through to consumption,” said John Gilbert, Data Governance Manager at Cbus. “This provides an audit trail and enables change impact analysis, reducing risks and ensuring that corporate data is managed as a critical asset and implemented in an effective and sustainable manner. This foundational strengthening of data governance underpins the four pillars of data culture maturity, providing a robust framework for our organization to become more competitive, compliant, and innovative in the face of change.”

“Collecting data is just the start; empowering everyone to truly understand and trust it unlocks its real value,” said Diby Malakar, Vice President of Product Management at Alation. “Alation’s business lineage sheds light on the data's journey, offering crucial context for impactful decisions. Integrating trusted data into strategic planning empowers companies to make swift, informed choices, reinforcing data governance as a fundamental pillar of business operations. This strengthens data culture, dismantles silos, and ensures data is fully leveraged in a governed way, blending data, people, and policies to foster insightful, collaborative decision-making and unlock data’s full potential.”

Alation’s lineage empowers technical and business teams to foster data trust and accelerate time to insights with: 

• Increased transparency. By providing data maps, all users can benefit from a better understanding of the data in a visual context that is meaningful to them. Users can also trace critical KPIs and metrics back to their sources and highlight essential data elements with contextual metadata overlays, such as data health, sensitivity, policies, or a chosen custom field, while filters allow users to see exactly what they need and drill down into areas of interest.
• Stronger data governance. With visibility into the movement and usage of sensitive data across the organization, audit times are significantly reduced. Additionally, governance teams can use classification metadata overlays in a business lineage view to see the movement and use of this data. Finally, Alation’s lineage provides users with the ability to monitor changes and trace them through an audit trail, enhancing governance with a retrospective view, and understanding impact analysis. This means users are aware of the consequences of their changes and identify who will be affected, fostering greater interconnectivity among teams. 
• Reduced costs. Business lineage reduces development and maintenance costs by streamlining change processes. Impact analysis and Trust Flags expedite error identification and correction, preventing expensive outages and reducing the time needed for root cause analysis. In addition, Alation's query log ingestion process provides essential operational metadata to help data operations teams derive insights that support cost savings through data pipeline performance optimization and technical debt reduction.

Latest raise builds on data analytics disruptor’s recent 109% YoY growth in revenue and placement as a Fast Mover and Challenger in the GigaOm Radar on Data Warehouses report

Ocient, the leading data analytics software solutions company, today announced that it has closed $49.4 million in funding. This latest raise is an extension of Ocient’s Series B financing, previously led by Greycroft and OCA Ventures, and includes new venture investors Buoyant Ventures, Levy Family Partners, Riverwalk Capital, and Wolf Capital Management, as well as all prior major investors. This latest raise will be used to advance product capabilities and deliver successful hyperscale data analytics solutions to Ocient’s growing global customer base. Including this current round, Ocient has raised a total of $119 million in invested capital since its founding in 2016. 

Ocient saw 109% YoY growth in revenue in its last fiscal year as more organizations seek end-to-end software solutions capable of delivering all-the-time, compute-intensive analysis of large, complex datasets while optimizing for performance, cost, and energy efficiency. The startup also made its debut in the GigaOm Radar for Data Warehouses report, named as a Fast Mover and Challenger in its inaugural placement. Ocient’s Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture™ (CASA), which removes network bottlenecks to facilitate rapid data access, was called out as a key strength for the disruptor, along with its always-on loading and data transformations (ETL/ELT), Zero Copy Reliability™ and in-database OcientML™ and OcientGeo™ capabilities, all of which deliver enhanced performance alongside energy and cost efficiencies for next-generation data analysis at growth-scale.

“Organizations are being challenged to deliver energy efficient hyper-growth data analysis without accelerating costs, which has become increasingly challenging as real-time analytics, SQL, AI/ML, and geospatial workloads typically require more energy consumption,” said Chris Gladwin, CEO of Ocient. “The close of this latest round of financing is an indication that the need for the solutions we bring to market is growing across industries, and geographies.”

"The world is connected through data, and a growing number of organizations are grappling with growing, complex datasets that are challenging the status quo of their existing systems,” said Jim Dugan, founding managing partner of OCA Ventures. “Ocient’s unique approach to enabling the analysis of these always-on, compute-intensive datasets while optimizing for performance, cost, and energy efficiency is a win-win for businesses and the environment, and OCA Ventures is thrilled to be a part of this next chapter of Ocient’s growth as it delivers its data analytics software solutions to a growing number of customers around the globe.”

The growth of compute-intensive data workloads is increasing the need for digital solutions that can positively impact energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change. In the Gartner® Top Trends in Data and Analytics, 2023 report, regarding D&A sustainability, “If current D&A and AI practices remain unchanged, and with their ongoing adoption, the energy needed for machine learning alone may grow to 3.5% of global electricity consumption by 2030.” The research recommends data and analytics leaders “adopt emerging practices to improve the energy efficiency of D&A and AI. These include the prioritized use of (cloud) data centers that are powered by renewable energy, the use of more energy efficient infrastructure, and the use of transfer learning, active learning, federated learning, composite AI and other approaches. Their benefits include less need for (training) data and more efficient machine learning, lower requirements for time, compute resources and energy.” * Minimized time, compute and energy consumption are all benefits Ocient delivers.

“The demand for computing power and storage space in data centers will continue to increase rapidly and cloud providers are struggling to buy enough clean energy to balance their growth, making decarbonization solutions for this sector hugely important for the future of our global climate,” said Amy Francetic, co-founder and managing partner of Buoyant Ventures. “Buoyant Ventures invests in organizations creating high-impact digital solutions in our fight against climate change. Ocient’s highly differentiated approach to delivering energy-efficient data analytics software solutions is a compelling fit, and we’re excited to see how the company continues to innovate and lead the way in this space.”

SheerID for WooCommerce helps online merchants acquire and verify consumers in high-value communities like students, teachers, and the military for special offers and discounts

SheerID, the global leader in identity verification for commerce, has partnered with Payment Plugins, one of the leading plugin developers for WooCommerce. WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress that simplifies creating and managing an online store. Today, SheerID announced SheerID for WooCommerce, allowing WooCommerce merchants to instantly verify consumer eligibility for gated offers and discounts to communities such as students, teachers, healthcare workers, military service members, and many more worldwide. SheerID for WooCommerce is a no-code, turnkey solution for merchants to launch a gated offer program rapidly. SheerID’s research has found that more than 80% of consumers within these communities buy from brands with a gated offer and more than 90% would share an offer with fellow community members.

RVbyMilitary.com is the first veteran-owned and operated peer-to-peer RV rental marketplace by military, for everyone. They are using SheerID for WooCommerce to welcome veteran, military members and first responders to list their RVs for rent on their website. To be eligible to list an RV, veterans, military members, and first responders must verify their identity through SheerID.

“Time is our only non-renewable resource. We created RVbyMilitary.com to make the most of that time and help service members turn their liability into an asset while enabling others to make memories through adventure and a love of the outdoors,” said Chris Wingate, Founder of RVbyMilitary.com and an Active Duty Army Officer. “We’re so grateful to find SheerID and Payment Plugins - partners we trust - to protect those who protect us, and provide an opportunity for others to give back to a community that has given so much.”

SheerID for WooCommerce provides merchants the following key features and capabilities to build gated offer programs worldwide instantly:

• Global community verification: SheerID for WooCommerce offers verification for 9 consumer communities, including students in 193 countries and 37 languages. For instance, if a shopper redeems a student discount from a merchant’s store, SheerID will instantly verify the person is an enrolled student before purchase.
• Highest instant verification: SheerID connects to 200k authoritative data sources worldwide to verify a person's eligibility within milliseconds. Instant verification provides a superior customer experience leading to higher conversion rates.
• First-party data acquisition: for shoppers to get verified for a student, military or other community-based discount, they share their information, such as their name, email address and school they attend. Merchants collect this valuable first party data to learn more about their customers and re-market to them based on these affiliations.
• No-code publishing options: SheerID for WooCommerce allows merchants to create simple, fast landing pages for verifying customers and can match the branding and color scheme of the online store.
• Product Restrictions: SheerID for WooCommerce makes it easy for merchants to restrict discounts to specific products, allowing them to restrict discounts based on inventory levels or focused marketing efforts.
• Checkout Reminders: With one click, merchants can send the shopper a reminder if they haven't finished cart checkout. This makes it easier for customers to finish the ordering process while reducing cart abandonment for the merchant.

"We’re thrilled to offer a SheerID integration for WooCommerce to allow merchants to verify the identity of customers and ensure their exclusive offers are only accessible to those they are intended for,” said Clayton Rogers, Founder of Payment Plugins.

“Offering merchants like RVbyMilitary.com an opportunity to earn extra money is a great way to give back to the people who work so hard to protect us,” said Jake Weatherly, Chief Executive Officer at SheerID. “We look forward to providing similar opportunities to the more than 4.5 million merchants on WooCommerce who want to make consumer transactions simple and secure while verifying customer identity for special offers and discounts.”

The announcement comes during the Game Developers Conference week, where the company will host a special side event

Blockus, an emerging, innovative force at the intersection of blockchain technology and gaming, today announced a significant milestone, securing $4M in pre-seed funding. This successful raise follows Blockus's participation in the prestigious a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, which not only provided access to mentors and advisors but also allowed the startup to connect with potential investors.

The pre-seed round was led by Maple VC and included Altos Ventures as well as known angel investors such as Zhuoxun Yin from Magic Eden, Michael Ma from CreatorDAO, and Bryan Pelligrino from LayerZero.

Blockus is dedicated to transforming the gaming experience by enabling studios to onboard their players and build on-chain gaming features with ease. The company has already gained traction in the market, with over 30 partners already signed, including Ambrus Studio, the team behind E4C: Final Salvation. The funding will allow Blockus to accelerate its growth, expand its team, strengthen sales operations, and invest heavily in product development.

"This pre-seed raise marks a pivotal moment in our journey," said Jess Zhang, Co-founder & CEO at Blockus. "The trust our investors, like Maple VC, have placed in us is both humbling and inspiring. We're ready to unlock the next level of innovation in the gaming industry, and we're excited to bring our blockchain solutions to even more studios and developers."

With a rapidly expanding market – approximately 62% of all dApp activity comes from gaming projects, and Web3 gaming is expected to reach $600B by 2030 – Blockus is in a prime position to capitalize on this growth.

"We're thrilled to witness Blockus's latest achievement," said Johnson Yeh, Founder & CEO at Ambrus Studio. "As innovators in the gaming space, we're proud to partner with a company that's pushing the boundaries of what's possible. The potential for Web3 in gaming is immense, and we're confident that Blockus will play a major role in shaping its future."

The announcement is made in the lead-up week to Game Developers Conference (GDC) taking place in San Francisco. There, the company will host a dedicated event on March 21 at 7 p.m. at the iconic SPIN bar to engage with the Web3 gaming community, and current and potential partners.

"Blockus has the potential to be the catalyst for a new era of gaming, built on the principles of decentralization and player ownership," said Andre Charoo, General Partner at Maple VC. "The founders' deep understanding of both gaming and Web3 technologies, combined with their track record, makes them an exceptionally compelling team to back. We believe Blockus is poised to lead the way in the Web3 gaming revolution."

To celebrate its funding milestone, Blockus is extending a special offer of $20,000 in credits to potential clients for the two weeks following the announcement period. This offer presents a unique opportunity for game developers interested in exploring how Blockus can elevate their game experiences.