Today, Webflow announced that it acquired Intellimize, a startup leveraging AI to personalize websites for unique visitors.
The majority of the Intellimize team — around 50 people — will join Webflow.
Vlad Magdalin, the CEO of Webflow, said Intellimize was a natural fit for Webflow’s first-ever acquisition because its product meets a need many Webflow customers share: personalizing and optimizing their websites.
Intellimize will continue to be sold standalone to non-Webflow customers, but it’ll increasingly link to — and integrate with — Webflow services.
— personalization product efforts at Webflow.
LinkedIn quietly started to post information describing its new Premium Company Page six days ago.
Pricing for premium company pages is not immediately disclosed, but it appears admins of pages that are eligible for it can see it.
The Premium Company Page subscription in some ways will look very familiar, in that it taps into well-known LinkedIn mechanics.
Testimonials, which LinkedIn has really promoted as a feature on profile pages for individuals, also get a push here: admins can display these prominently at the top of their premium pages.
Last but not least, with LinkedIn big on verification lately, and here too a Page can get a golden badge with a premium subscription.
Some may help businesses build a website, whereas others may just be useful for getting listed on search engines.
The startup also uses AI to ease businesses’ journey to digitize thousands of stores in one go.
Tarun Sobhani, co-founder and CEO of SingleInterface, told TechCrunch that the startup helps businesses grow their revenues by 15–20% using its products.
Sobhani and Harish Bahl, the founder of consumer internet investor and venture-building firm Smile Group, co-founded the startup in 2015.
Sobhani said the startup plans to add many people in the Asia-Pacific region to grow its presence.
ChowNow snaps up YC-backed POS platform Cuboh and is laying off staffChowNow, the online ordering platform and marketing service for local restaurants, acquired Cuboh, a Y Combinator-backed point-of-sale (POS) platform that consolidates all orders from delivery apps into one place.
This marks ChowNow’s first acquisition, which will help strengthen its POS integration solution and help restaurants tackle orders across multiple services.
Meanwhile, Cuboh’s entire 30-person team — including marketing, sales, product and engineering — is transitioning to ChowNow.
Starting next week, restaurant owners can access a newly launched bundle, “ChowNow + Cuboh,” for $275 per month.
“It’s getting back to the longer-term product vision of what we’re building, of being the only platform restaurants need for their entire takeout business,” Webb said.
“The top use of Nextdoor is people looking for providers, HVAC especially,” Laufer told TechCrunch.
PipeDreams has purchased nine companies so far and currently operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tucson, and Denver with plans to expand.
“The beauty of this industry is it’s massive, there are over 100,000 businesses doing plumbing and HVAC,” Laufer said about the U.S. market.
Laufer said owning the HVAC companies outright is what differentiates PipeDreams from other competitors looking to just connect consumers with professionals, like Angie and Thumbtack.
PipeDreams is also addressing the skills shortage in the HVAC and plumbing industries, as Gen Z is less interested in learning trades then generations before them.
ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced today that it raised $18.5 million.
To date, creators have earned “tens of millions in commissions” on the platform, the company tells TechCrunch.
“He observed a significant disconnect in the social media ecosystem: influencers struggled to monetize their product recommendations effectively, and their followers didn’t have an easy path to purchase.
Chris viewed ShopMy as the solution, a bridge that transformed how influencers share and monetize their product recommendations,” Rein explains.
Even Instagram has embraced creator marketing, launching a marketplace tool for paid partnerships in 2022.
Lago, developer of an open-source billing platform, has picked up the funding across two rounds of funding it’s revealing to coincide with its official launch.
The Lago doing business today as a billing platform got its start in a very classical startup way: it had no idea that it would be a billing platform.
There are even a number of providers already pursuing an open-source approach, including FossBilling, ChargeBee, Kill Bill, AppDirect’s jBilling and the imaginatively named “Open Source Billing.” (Why beat around the bush?)
So it’s an it’s still an unsolved problem.” In Lago’s view, offering open source tools is that best solution to meet a variety of needs and ideas.
For some of those users, the open source ethos also lines up with what they are hoping to espouse themselves as businesses.
Blueshift, a San Francisco-based startup that taps AI to help brands automate and personalize engagement across different marketing channels, has secured $40 million in debt financing from Runway Growth Capital.
Blueshift competes with a number of vendors in the marketing automation space, including several who aim to build solutions from the ground up on GenAI.
There’s also Pixie, an AI-powered full-stack marketing platform; Aampe, a marketing automation platform for mobile apps; and Connectly, which employs automation to nudge shoppers to complete purchases.
As of June 2023, HubSpot had a roughly 37% share of the marketing automation market, followed by Adobe (~7%), Oracle (~7%) and ActiveCampaign (~7%).
But it’s a very lucrative venture, marketing automation.
Creating a startup without a fixed idea is like building a startup backward.
Our journey began when my co-founder, Qi Cao, was exploring various startup ideas.
Due to the increased paid marketing costs, finding new and cheaper ways of acquiring customers through content has become top of mind for startups and small businesses.
Although arguably positive for us as consumers, the privacy trend is causing paid marketing costs to soar.
Keep testing various marketing tactics until you strike gold, and measure your results to see if they were successful.
In the past two years, Breakr has onboarded over 30,000 influencers and managed more than $3.5 million in creator transactions.
Now, to fuel its growth, Breakr has secured an additional $1.9 million at a valuation of $20 million.
There are a number of platforms in the market today that connect creators, brands and content (such as music but other media, too) to build influencer campaigns.
On the music side, artists (or labels) submit music for a particular campaign; and if the music gets selected, it gets promoted to new audiences.
While music marketing is its main bread and butter, Breakr eventually wants to tap into other fields like film and television.
