Contentful Raises $175 Million, Algolia Nets $150 Million and More CX News


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Web content management got a big boost this week. Contentful, a web content management software provider, has announced that it closed a $175 million Series F funding round, with a valuation of over $3 billion. Tiger Global led the round with Base10 Advancement Initiative and Tidemark also joining Contentful’s existing investors.

Berlin-based Contentful produces software that helps brands power digital experiences across websites, mobile apps, digital displays and other connected devices. Contentful will use its Series F funding to expand its global footprint in marketing and sales as well as continue in its investment in building out its content platform, ecosystem and next generation of products, according to company officials.

Contentful’s ascension comes at a time when digital customer experience software providers are competing for brands’ attention in a digitally-transformed world thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And it’s been hot for acquisitions and investments in last couple of years. Vista Equity Partners acquired digital experience platform (DXP) provider Acquia for $1 billion in late 2019. Episerver acquired Optimizely in September of 2020 and rebranded to the acquired. Bloomreach in January 2021 acquired a CDP (Exponea) and valued itself at $900 million. Crownpeak acquired fellow DXP provider e-Spirit in March of this year. Sitecore made three acquisitions within three months this year and also announced a $1.2 billion private investment.

Those players are not quite in the Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle class in terms of revenue in the space; Adobe made $3.13 billion in its digital experience business unit in 2020, up 12% from $2.80 billion the year before.

But there’s no denying the up-and-coming momentum of digital experience software brands like Contentful. The company also announced this week the appointment of two new independent board members, Elena Donio and Fred Ball. Donio is the former CEO of Axiom and former president of SAP Concur. She spent over 18 years at Concur in a variety of leadership roles across product, sales and marketing. Donio also currently serves on the board of directors at Twilio and Databricks. Ball joins the Contentful board having served as the CFO at several companies including Marketo, Webroot Software, BigBand Networks and Borland Software. He is currently on the board of Advanced Energy and FirstMark Acquisition Corporation and previously served on the board of directors at SendGrid.

In other customer experience and digital marketing software news…

Algolia Closes $150 Million Series D

Algolia, an API platform for search and dynamic experiences, has closed $150 million in series D funding led by Lone Pine Capital at a post money valuation of $2.25 billion. The round also includes funding from Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, STEADFAST Capital Ventures, Glynn Capital, Twilio, and existing investors including Accel and Salesforce Ventures. This latest funding round brings Algolia’s total funding to $315 million.

Algolia powers search and content discovery for developers with an API-first approach applied to SaaS applications, ecommerce and enterprise applications. This additional investment allows Algolia to scale and serve the increased demand for the company’s Search and Recommendations products, as well as fuel the company’s continued product expansion into adjacent markets and use-cases, according to company officials.

Meanwhile, the company added seven leaders to its executive suite in the last 18 months: Bernadette Nixon (chief executive officer, formerly of Alfresco), Michelle Adams (chief revenue officer, formerly of Dropbox), Carlton Baab (chief financial officer, formerly of Alfresco), Piyush Patel (chief business development officer, formerly of Capgemini), Jim Schattin (chief customer officer, formerly of Alteryx), Jason McClelland (chief marketing officer, formerly of Salesforce and Adobe) and Bharat Guruprakash (chief product officer, formerly of Twilio).

Uniphore To Acquire Jacada

Uniphore, a conversational service automation provider, has announced its agreement to acquire Jacada, a low code/no code platform for contact center automation. Combined with Jacada’s innovative low code/no code platform, Uniphore’s conversational automation platform will empower businesses to automate interactions across self-service and agent-assisted customer engagements.

The combined software systems will include:

  • Optimized and customizable AI models for different industry verticals.
  • Workflow and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for both multi-modal self-service and agent-assisted interactions.
  • Fully scripted and AI-enabled next-best action.
  • Enhanced knowledge-base guidance.
  • Automated agent after-call work (ACW) summaries and call disposition.
  • Automatic logging of promises made during agent interaction and managing the fulfillment post call.
  • End-to-end post interaction analytics and insights. 

GraphCMS Raises $10M in Series A Funding

GraphCMS, a Berlin-based content management platform, has announced it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round. The round was led by OpenOcean. Previous investors Peak and Paua Ventures also participated, bringing the company’s total funding to $13.7 million. Mango Capital’s Robin Vasan (investor in HashiCorp, Netlify, and others), Fauna founder and CTO, Evan Weaver, and Instana (acquired by IBM) founder and CEO Mirko Novakovic also joined this round. GraphCMS will use the funding to expand its commercial footprint within the U.S. and European markets.

GraphCMS’s Content Federation is designed to allow users to join siloed data from diverse sources into a single API programmatically. Enterprises are able to access this single API via whichever front end they prefer.

Adobe Partners With Walmart in Ecommerce

Adobe has announced a new partnership with Walmart to make several of Walmart’s technologies and capabilities available to Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source customers. Adobe retail customers will be able to implement Walmart’s fulfillment technologies in their own physical stores to offer pickup experiences and to reach new customers by syndicating their products online on Walmart Marketplace.

The partnership enables software users to:

  • Show store pickup eligibility and available pickup times online.
  • Offer multiple pickup options including curbside and in-store pickup.
  • Provide store associates with mobile tools to optimize pick path, multi-order pickups, validate item selection and manage substitutions.
  • Enable collection experiences for consumers, including order pickup communications, check-in options to notify store associates, customer ETA and arrival detection.

Alida Releases Summer 2021 Product Suite 

Alida, a customer experience management and insights platform, has delivered its Summer 2021 product release, including enhancements in customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), product experience (PX) and brand experience (BX).

The release includes advanced analytics capabilities, flexibility to support over 100 third-party integrations, a new user interface (UI), a retail industry solution and 21 new features to the Alida platform. In addition, Alida is bringing to market diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) solutions. The product release enables brands to aggregate and act on experience data and operational data and integrate with ERP systems, CRM systems, marketing automation systems, employee data from HRIS systems and Slack among other advancements.

Act-On Software Adds to C-Suite

Act-On Software, a marketing automation platform, has announced the addition of Gregg Ames as chief commercial officer and Syed Ahmed as senior vice president of engineering, both reporting to Act-On CEO Kate Johnson. Ames joins Act-On after driving revenue and sales growth at Marketo, Oracle and Turning. He will be charged with expediting Act-On’s business growth and accelerating momentum upmarket into enterprise-level deployments.

Ahmed has extensive experience leading engineering and operations teams, most recently as CTO and VP of Engineering at Contiq. Syed also spent four years leading a high growth period at Tapclicks, a marketing operations start-up.





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