Canaan

ContentSquare Raises A $42M Series B To Democratize Data Analytics For Ecomm Brands

ContentSquare, a Paris-based ecommerce analytics platform, has raised a $42 million Series B round from investors including US VC firm Canaan and Highland Europe, bringing total funding to $62 million after this round (the prior raise was $20 million). The company will deploy the funds to advance machine learning and AI R&D and to expand its global sales, marketing, and product teams, with a strong emphasis on growing the US operation. ContentSquare employs about 70 developers and data scientists, and reportedly hired around 30 people in the US last year. CEO Jonathan Cherki notes the US as its main and largest market across ecommerce, retail, and other sectors. Customers include Lipton, L’Occitane, Clarks, and Tiffany’s. The firm aims to partner with larger enterprise players rather than compete directly, citing many customers also use Adobe Analytics or Google Premium. The platform uses ML to provide UX recommendations based on onsite/in-app user behavior, targeting non-technical business users.

Arbor Raises $6.5 Million To Help Pubs Capitalize On People-Based Data

Arbor, a San Francisco and New York–based startup, raised $6.5 million in its Series A led by Canaan Partners with participation from First Round Capital to scale its people-based data marketplace. Arbor positions itself as a combination of a supply-side platform and a data co-op for deterministic, people-based data, built on a device graph that links hashed identifiers to first-party publisher data. Publishers feed data into Arbor and can monetize by granting advertisers access, with the graph expanding as matches occur and publishers can fuse multiple sources to increase reach. The company aims to help publishers and app developers control their data assets in a landscape dominated by Google and Facebook’s walled gardens. Funds will support engineering, expanding the team to ~40 employees, and international growth in Europe and Asia, with the US as a priority. Arbor, founded in 2014, operates from San Francisco and New York; its seed round was $2.55 million led by First Round Capital.

Former Admeld CTO Sets His Sights On Streaming Video With MightyTV Launch

MightyTV, a free iOS discovery app, launched out of beta to allow cross-platform search across Amazon Instant Video, HBO Go, Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, iTunes, Cinemax, Showtime and Lifetime without switching apps. Created by Brian Adams, founder of Admeld and former CTO, who spent over three years at Google after Admeld's 2011 acquisition for $400 million. MightyTV catalogs about 11,000 videos at launch and aims to grow that number. The app uses a Tinder-like swipe interface with a behavior-based recommendation engine and features a Mashup option that lets up to 10 users combine swipes into a shared playlist. Users can sign up via Facebook to share lists. The focus is on personalization rather than monetization, and MightyTV has seed funding of $2.5 million in 2015 from Spark and Canaan Venture Partners, with plans for further funding.