Tag Archives: artificial intelligence (AI)

Pendo Announces Acquisition of Forwrd.ai, Bringing AI-Powered Predictive Analytics into the Pendo Platform

Thomabravo

Introduces Pendo Predict to equip GTM and product teams with instant insights to drive retention, expansion and pipeline growth

RALEIGH, N.C. and TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—Pendo, the world’s first software experience management platform, today announced that it has acquired Forwrd.ai, an Israel-based no-code predictive analytics platform that empowers business leaders to build custom AI models that predict churn, upsell potential, and lead quality, without the need for data scientists or engineers.

In today’s enterprise landscape, go-to-market and product teams are inundated with vast amounts of user and behavioral data, but often lack the tools to interpret it effectively without heavy reliance on technical teams. This acquisition addresses a growing demand for more accessible, real-time insights that inform smarter business decisions.

The Forwrd technology will serve as the foundation of a new suite of AI-driven capabilities within the Pendo platform called Pendo Predict. By combining rich usage data with Forwrd’s automated models, Pendo Predict empowers cross-functional teams to proactively identify risk and opportunity—whether it’s surfacing high-intent leads for sales, detecting churn risk and suggesting customer interventions, or uncovering expansion opportunities. The result is a more agile, aligned enterprise that can act quickly on data signals to drive retention, expansion, and revenue growth.

“Usage data is the truest and most reliable signal of customer health,” said Todd Olson, CEO and co-founder of Pendo.” By integrating Forwrd’s predictive engine into the Pendo platform, we’re giving every team instant, actionable intelligence to grow revenue and eliminate churn.”

Pendo Predict includes powerful features like:

  • Churn risk modeling: Identify accounts likely to drop off—and why.
  • Lead qualification and scoring: Prioritize the prospects most likely to convert based on in-app signals.
  • Expansion opportunity detection: Spot users with high upsell potential based on feature usage momentum.
  • Predictive segmentation: Filter and target customer segments dynamically based on forecasted outcomes.
  • “Next Best Action” recommendations: Surface intelligent suggestions (e.g., launch a guide in Pendo, escalate to customer success, flag an account in Salesforce).

“From day one, our mission has been to simplify predictive AI and embed it at the core of business operations,” said Kobi Stok, CEO and founder of Forwrd. “By combining Pendo’s proprietary data and experience layer with Forwrd’s technology, we’re transforming product, marketing, and CRM data into actions that empower teams across the organization and enable hyper-personalized customer experiences.”

Stok is an experienced product executive and serial entrepreneur who founded Forwrd.ai in 2021 and built strong early traction with industry leaders like SAP, Hubspot, JFrog and AppsFlyer. Stok and team will join Pendo’s Herzilya, Israel office.

Pendo announced the acquisition during its Pendomonium X event in Munich. The news follows a series of recent product releases that help teams measure the performance of AI agents, improve user onboarding, cut support costs, increase upsell revenue, and drive team productivity.

About Pendo:

At Pendo, we’re on a mission to improve the world’s experience with software. Thousands of global companies use Pendo to provide better software experiences for 900 million people every month. Pendo improves business outcomes by enabling non-engineers to analyze, assess, and act on software issues. Our integrated Software Experience Management (SXM) platform manages the entire enterprise software asset: Customer- and employee-facing applications; desktop and mobile platforms; and SaaS, AI and Agentic software. Find out more at pendo.com.

Read the release on the Pendo website here.

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Launching New Fund to Fuel the Next Generation of Nordic Tech Founders

Anthemis

We’re excited to share that we’ve successfully completed the first close of our new fund, Alliance Nordic III, backed by leading Nordic LPs including Saminvest, KLP, Investinor, Smedvig, and Telenor. The new fund enables us to reinforce our commitment to back the next wave of Nordic-founded global technology leaders.

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From Left: Anders Hallin, Stine Sørensen, Johan Gjesdahl, Henrik Torstensson, Bente Loe & Arne Tonning.

Investing in the value creation unleashed by the AI revolution

For the last two decades, the dominant technology forces were mobile and cloud, which combined with the SaaS business model, have dramatically improved capabilities, efficiency, and productivity across industries. We’ve historically invested in companies building products and services riding this technology wave.

To us, AI is no longer just an enabling technology. AI is replacing entire workflows, transforming tools into digital labor, and fundamentally shifting how value is created. AI is shaping up to be the most significant technology shift in decades, promising to be as important as the Internet or the semiconductor.

We see this reflected in our past investments. For many years Alliance VC has invested in companies using AI across areas like business productivity, climate and energy, digital health and fintech. The typical AI investment involves machine learning applied to business problems, yet in the last three years startups have shifted to building generative AI-driven products.

While AI is driving change and gaining a new wave of attention, we see it as a natural extension and amplification of the trend we’ve long backed: technologies that deliver impact, productivity, and transformation through software and data.

We expect AI to be the core thread running through most of our future investments, like it already is for the majority of our current portfolio companies.

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Our strategy: Back Ambitious Nordic Founders Early

We believe the best way to invest in the future is to partner with ambitious founders solving big problems using powerful technology in potentially large markets.

This means that we try not to limit ourselves to which founders we meet, rather we look at all startups coming out of the Nordic countries.

However, we are especially interested in, and have historically made the most investments in, the areas of business efficiency, climate and energy, fintech and digital health. All areas where the Nordics have ambitious entrepreneurs and strong ecosystems.

Among the thousands of Nordic startups being founded every year, we are setting out to invest in 25–30 of them over the next few years. Not all startups are the same, so we don’t expect all our investments to look exactly the same. But we believe that our initial investment will typically be €1–2 million, in a range of €300,000 to €3 million, across pre-seed, seed and Series A.

With that in mind, our intent and strategy is to remain agile, as that will best allow us to serve ambitious founders that are creating the future.

Our Approach: Partner-Led, Founder-First

The partners at Alliance VC combine a long investment track-record with successful operational and entrepreneurial experience over the last 15+ years. This brings together the best of ‘experienced managers’ with the best of ‘emerging managers’.

Alliance VC is the only firm with team members in all four major Nordic capitals Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki, and we are proud to have deep local roots and global experience from firms like Spotify, Kry, Lifesum, Stardoll, Skype and Radiobotics.

We lead with a partner-first approach: where we strive to ensure that every founder meets a decision-maker from day one. This is based on our own experience as founders raising venture capital. We want to be able to move fast, stay close, and commit to being a high-value sparring partner from seed to scale. We are proud to be working with founders from e.g. 1X, Sanity, Superside, Hemby, Xeneta, Boost.ai and many more.

Why Now and Why the Nordics?

The Nordic startup ecosystem is on fire. Valued at $552 billion it has grown 16x in the past decade, according to the 2024 Dealroom Nordics Innovation Report. Many of the companies behind this growth are well-known, like Spotify, Klarna, Supercell, Kahoot, and Unity. And a new generation of founders are currently building startups that we believe will become even bigger.

With the growth of AI applications powering products and services, from business tasks like patent writing to humanoid robots, we see the Nordics being well-placed to leverage traditional strengths in building startups with the almost limitless possibilities of AI. This can be seen across Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland in the wave of new startups built by founders with bigger ambitions than ever before.

At Alliance VC, we see this moment as a generational opportunity and will focus where we believe the Nordics have the strongest global potential and especially on companies that combine AI technology with real-world impact.

Looking Ahead

Alliance Nordic III is more than a new fund. It’s a continuation of our commitment to partner with founders from the Nordics to scale globally and shape the future. As AI transforms every industry and the Nordics step into the global spotlight, we’re here to fuel and to support the new generation of builders.

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Wonderful Raises $34m to Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption in Non-English Speaking Markets

Index Ventures

Wonderful co-founders Bar Winkler (CEO) and Roey Lalazar (CTO)

QUICK TAKE

  • Wonderful, the agentic AI customer service platform, has raised a $34 million seed round, led by Index Ventures
  • Most AI customer service solutions focus on English-speaking markets, leaving billions of customers underserved across Europe, Asia and the Middle East
  • Founded in 2025 in Tel Aviv by Bar Winkler (CEO) and Roey Lalazar (CTO), Wonderful is already powering hundreds of thousands of customer interactions for 15 market-leading enterprises
  • The team combines exceptional technical depth with unmatched execution – Bar led global expansion at decacorn IronSource before founding and selling Approve.com, while CTO Roey built million-dollar businesses and led elite security teams in the Israeli intelligence service
  • They’re targeting a $200 billion market opportunity by targeting non-English speaking markets

INDEX PERSPECTIVE

By Hannah Seal, Juriaan Duizendstraal

Contact centers around the world are fundamentally broken. Customers face long wait times, limited availability, and often subpar support experiences. AI agents are the natural solution — yet while big tech companies race to perfect AI for English speakers, a massive $200 billion market remains systematically underserved, leaving billions without effective support.

Customer service isn’t one-size-fits-all. Israeli customers expect to interrupt freely, Italian bank clients hang up after five minutes on hold, and Greek callers abandon the line within two. These nuances matter, and most AI providers aren’t equipped to handle them.

Our latest research shows that more companies than ever are born global, expanding internationally from day one. But building truly human-like AI support agents that can operate across languages and cultural contexts has proven elusive. While most vendors stick to the same English-speaking markets, Wonderful is going after everything and everyone else — markets that collectively dwarf the Anglophone world, yet remain largely ignored by B2B software.

Take Israel: enterprises spend over $4 billion a year on customer support for just 10 million people. Scale that across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and the opportunity jumps to hundreds of billions. Seizing it requires rare focus and execution — which is exactly what the Wonderful team brings. They operate with a unique blend of obsession, urgency, and speed: a customer call one evening, a working product the next day.

Their AI platform delivers seamless customer interactions across languages — zero wait time, 24/7 availability, and expert-level support via voice, chat, and email. With exceptional fluency and cultural awareness, they’re already transforming the global customer service landscape, powering hundreds of thousands of interactions across telecoms, financial services, and healthcare.

Wonderful is not just fixing broken support — they’re redefining what global customer experience should look like.

THE DETAILS

Wonderful’s strategy involves winning over markets that are highly distributed, versatile, and tough to crack with AI. Built to handle multiple cultural and linguistic nuances, the platform not only dramatically cuts costs, but typically delivers a much better experience for customers too. It can be tailored to work for multiple regulated industries, to integrate with legacy systems, and to connect to internal systems and workflows to allow its agents to understand customer-facing processes. This means corporations no longer need to choose between cutting-edge capabilities and full localization – they get both.

“We looked at the current state of AI and found it unbearable that most of the world will have to wait years for something that can be delivered today,” said Bar Winkler, Wonderful’s Co‑Founder & CEO. “Our strategy is simple: rapidly partner with the top enterprises in each market and build the talent density needed to obsess over delivering an amazing experience for their customers.”

Bar and his co-founder Roey Lalazar (CTO) are exceptional entrepreneurs. Bar was one of the earliest employees for IronSource, an app-scaling business that grew to a $11 billion at its peak, and sold his subsequent business Approve.com for $40M within two years. Roey has been building businesses since age 15 – creating Android apps with millions of downloads, bootstrapping a business to $1M revenue in under 12 months by age 22, and leading an elite unit within Israeli military intelligence.

“Our 2,000 customer service agents handle millions of interactions each month,” said Nir David, CEO of Bezeq, Israel’s largest ISP and telco. “We evaluated over a dozen AI solutions, and Wonderful was the only one that met our bar.”

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Hightouch and Snowflake Boost AI-Powered Marketing Data Stack with Snowflake Ventures Investment

Snowflake

Marketing teams are increasingly leveraging AI to deliver differentiated and personalized experiences, and it’s clear this is where the competitive advantage now lies. In fact, nearly 75% of marketers already feel AI gives them an edge, and more than 85% plan to significantly increase their AI adoption in the next two to three years. To achieve and scale high-ROI campaigns, marketing and data teams need better ways to collaborate to unlock and activate strategic insights from their data.

This critical need makes our latest Snowflake Ventures investment in Hightouch, alongside Capital One Ventures, all the more essential. Hightouch is a data and AI platform for marketers that empower enterprises to activate their customer data directly from Snowflake to over 200 destinations, including critical marketing and advertising platforms.

We recently recognized Hightouch’s achievements within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud ecosystem by naming it our 2025 Marketers & Advertisers Data Cloud Product Partner of the Year. Hightouch earned this recognition for helping our joint customers personalize experiences, drive measurable ROI across marketing and advertising channels and activate data at scale.

 

Powering new AI marketing innovations

The combined power of Snowflake and Hightouch delivers a secure, governed data stack for AI-driven marketing. This investment sets the stage for joint development of solutions that will change how marketers operate, including new AI-driven capabilities like Hightouch AI Decisioning – an agentic AI product for lifecycle marketing that runs natively via Snowflake Cortex AI.

These new capabilities, along with support for Snowflake Horizon Catalog — a fully integrated solution for role-based access controls — will make it easier for Hightouch customers to fully adopt Snowflake as their AI Data Cloud. This provides frictionless access to native security, governance and advanced AI features not available on other data platforms. This will also simplify the adoption of Hightouch for Snowflake customers, enabling them to easily leverage its AI-powered marketing solutions to drive personalization at scale.

 

Real-world impact with AI

Hundreds of customers are already using Hightouch as their Composable CDP and AI marketing solution with Snowflake as the single source of truth for all customer, marketing and enterprise data, including:

  • WHOOP: The marketing team at WHOOP uses Hightouch and Snowflake Cortex AI to maximize customer lifetime value through AI-powered personalization. This enables them to break free from the constraints of rule-based marketing and take personalization efforts beyond human scale, using AI to autonomously experiment and optimize every customer interaction.
  • Warner Music Group (WMG): WMG’s music publishing company, Warner Chappell Music, has more than 1 million copyrights in its catalog. By building a consumer intelligence platform with Snowflake and Hightouch, WMG now leverages data to “super-serve” fans, artists and brands. This has helped them increase efficiency with streamlined audience creation and syndication, as well as accelerate data-driven collaboration and innovation.
  • Accor: The global hospitality group implemented a Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP) using Snowflake and Hightouch to improve customer segmentation and personalized marketing. This system reduced campaign preparation time from three weeks to two days, enhanced data-driven marketing for more effective targeting and optimized budgets, and laid the groundwork for future AI integration for deeper customer insights.

What’s next for Hightouch and Snowflake

The future of AI-driven marketing with Hightouch and Snowflake is incredibly exciting. We envision AI decisioning rapidly evolving to train on all data types — structured and unstructured — accessed directly within Snowflake, fundamentally transforming creative strategies. Expect to see dedicated, industry-specific solutions emerge across retail, financial services, healthcare/life sciences and media and entertainment, bringing bespoke AI power to every sector.

Learn how leading marketers across industries are using the Snowflake AI Data Cloud to unify their customer, marketing and enterprise data.

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819 Capital makes follow-on investment in ScoutinScience to scale AI-driven research

819 Capital Partners

Deventer, 27 June 2025 – 819 Capital reaffirms its commitment to ScoutinScience by joining their €1 million growth investment round, alongside new angel investors with AI-expertise. The investment will support the further development and international expansion of the company’s AI-powered research valorisation platform.

ScoutinScience uses advanced AI and natural language processing to systematically identify, assess, and accelerate the real-world impact of academic research. Its proprietary models uncover untapped innovation potential at scale, enabling universities, TTOs, and public institutions to shift from passive IP management to proactive, data-driven valorisation.

With active clients in Germany, Austria, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and collaborations spanning over 10 countries, ScoutinScience is building the AI-powered backbone for a more connected, strategic European innovation ecosystem.

The new funding will accelerate entry into additional European markets, expand AI-driven tools and metrics, and enable broader services in innovation scouting, matchmaking, and policy-grade reporting.

ScoutinScience represents the next generation of research infrastructure; smart, scalable, and mission-driven. 819 Capital is pleased to support this step in building a stronger, more data-informed European knowledge economy.

For more information: https://scoutinscience.com/

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Altor advances AI leadership through a strategic partnership with WovenLight

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Altor and WovenLight have entered into a strategic partnership to drive artificial intelligence (AI) in Altor as a firm and amongst its portfolio companies. The partnership is a core part of Altor’s ambition to play a leading role in value creation through AI following its successful investment in Silo AI, sold to AMD in Europe’s largest AI exit to date.

WovenLight was established to unlock superior performance in private markets by reimagining value creation capabilities through a differentiated “co-sponsorship” business model. With a focus on the private equity industry, WovenLight leverages its expertise to enhance the value creation plan and strengthen the investment thesis by operationalising AI within portfolio assets.

By partnering with WovenLight, Altor adds another layer to its long legacy of leading business transformations. WovenLight will act as an AI transformation partner to Altor and its portfolio companies through joint value creation initiatives. The collaboration already has several live projects, including in CCM Hockey and Svea Solar. Looking ahead, Altor and WovenLight will continue to identify initiatives to drive value creation by applying WovenLight’s know-how and AI capabilities to leverage both firms’ combined resources for greater results.

“We are excited to bring WovenLight on board as an AI transformation partner. Their expertise will help us accelerate our work to future-proof businesses. Value creation is at the core of what we do – it’s how we help companies win. Assisting companies through the AI transition will be one of the most important themes for private equity in the coming years,” said Paal Weberg, Managing Partner at Altor.

“We looked for the best experts in the industry and this is what we found in WovenLight. We are now, when adding WovenLight’s exceptional talent to our internal AI capabilities, taking a leading position in the industry with our technology-driven approach to value creation,” said Mattias Holmström, Partner and Head of the Tech Sector at Altor.

“I’m delighted to partner with Altor given their long-standing track record of helping build outstanding companies and delivering premium returns. We believe that working together systematically pre and post deal to assess and implement performance improvement through the use of data and AI represents the next generation in private equity value creation. Together we can help build purposeful and resilient businesses with the goals of outperformance and continuing to deliver compelling returns. Our approach brings together complementary skillsets and clear alignment of interest”, said Simon Williams, Partner and Founder of WovenLight.

About Altor

Since inception, the family of Altor funds has raised more than EUR 12 billion in total commitments. The funds have invested in more than 100 companies. The investments have been made in medium- sized companies predominantly in Nordic and DACH with the aim to create value through growth initiatives and operational improvements. Among current and past investments are Silo AI, FLSmidth, Meltwater, Marshall, CCM and Mandatum.

About WovenLight

WovenLight is a technology and private equity investing company with a differentiated “co-sponsorship” business model, delivering sophisticated data analytics and artificial intelligence to improve performance in private equity portfolio companies, while deploying capital alongside private equity firms into these businesses. WovenLight was founded by Simon Williams, who previously co- founded QuantumBlack, a machine learning and data sciences consulting firm launched in 2009 and acquired by McKinsey & Company in 2015. Beginning in 2023, WovenLight has partnered with Tetragon Financial Group Limited and its private equity business, Banyan Square Partners.

Press contact

Karin Åström

Head of Communications

karin.astrom@altor.com

+46 707 64 86 59

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Introducing Mandolin: AI Teammates for Healthcare

Introducing Mandolin: AI Teammates for Healthcare

When we first met Will Yin and Rohit Rustagi, it was clear that they were obsessed with solving an urgent problem in healthcare: closing the time-to-access for specialty therapies that treat conditions like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

In our meeting, Will articulated how he could build “a new kind of worker for healthcare.” One that could log in, pick up the phone, fill out a form, and ultimately help patients get access to specialty pharmaceuticals in a fraction of the time.

It was an idea rooted in experience. Both Will and Rohit had family members struggle to access specialty therapies for conditions like cancer and Alzheimer’s — the types of drugs that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take weeks or months to approve (if they’re approved at all). These are powerful, personalized therapies, but the workflows to deliver them are stuck in the past. Clinics, health systems, and pharmacies lose weeks navigating approvals, reading policy documents, and chasing reimbursement — all while patients wait for treatment.

And the problem is only growing. Specialty drugs now account for over half of U.S. prescription spend and are 75% of the FDA drug pipeline. The healthcare system can’t keep up.

Mandolin is solving for this, with its AI automation platform for specialty drug access. We at Greylock are privileged to partner with Will and Rohit and lead the company’s Series A investment.

Mandolin’s AI agents act like full-time employees — reading, reasoning, and completing tasks across systems. From benefits verification to prior auth and billing, it’s not a tool but a workforce. One that works 24/7, scales effortlessly, and delivers higher accuracy than traditional workflows.

And it’s working. Since launching their agents in January, Mandolin is already live with some of the largest infusion providers, specialty pharmacies, and health systems in the country, including Vivo, FlexCare, OI Infusion, and TwelveStone. It’s deployed at 700+ clinics and serves over 250,000 new patients annually. Teams are cutting days of administrative work down to hours, increasing revenue, reducing manual overhead, and getting patients on therapy weeks sooner than before.

Some of the most thoughtful founders we’ve worked with didn’t initially set out to build companies, but encountered a problem they just had to solve. Will spent his high school and college years publishing neuroscience research and preparing for a career as a physician-scientist. Rohit, a Fulbright awardee, studied bioethics and entered med school at Stanford. They each walked away from medicine — not because they lost faith in science, but because they realized the real bottleneck was the system and the timing was right to make a real impact.

The emergence of multi-agent AI platforms finally has the tooling to automate complex workflows end-to-end. As Mandolin builds the definitive AI teammate for the largest health systems in the world, we’re proud to support Will, Rohit, and team as they turn AI into a force that helps more people access the care they need, when they need it. If you’re interested in this mission, Mandolin is hiring!

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Mercanis Secures Over $20 Million in Series A Round

AVP
  • The company receives fresh capital from new investors Partech and AVP, as well as from existing investors.
  • Mercanis enables over 40% process cost savings and supports clients such as BASF-Coatings, GASAG, Goldbeck, Wilson, and Brose.
  • The funds will be used to further develop Agentic AI and support the upcoming expansion plans, including into the U.S.

Berlin, June 11, 2025

In its latest Series A round, Mercanis, a Berlin-based startup for Agentic-AI procurement solutions, has raised over $20 million. The round was led by new investors Partech and AVP, with additional funding from existing investors, including Signals.VC, Capmont Technology, and Speedinvest. Well-known business angels like Dr. Ulrich Piepel, Dr. Marcell Vollmer, Mirko Novakovic (Instana & Dash0), and Victor Jacobsson (Klarna) continue their support for Mercanis. The additional capital will be used to further strengthen the company’s leadership position in Agentic-AI and accelerate its international expansion, including entry into the U.S. market.zIn its latest Series A round, Mercanis, a Berlin-based startup for Agentic-AI procurement solutions, has raised over $20 million. The round was led by new investors Partech and AVP, with additional funding from existing investors, including Signals.VC, Capmont Technology, and Speedinvest. Well-known business angels like Dr. Ulrich Piepel, Dr. Marcell Vollmer, Mirko Novakovic (Instana & Dash0), and Victor Jacobsson (Klarna) continue their support for Mercanis. The additional capital will be used to further strengthen the company’s leadership position in Agentic-AI and accelerate its international expansion, including entry into the U.S. market.

Fabian Heinrich, CEO and Co-Founder of Mercanis, states: “The trust placed in us by both long-standing and new investors is not only a powerful endorsement of our mission, but also a driving force behind our ongoing commitment to excellence. With this funding, we can expand our AI solution and accelerate our international expansion – particularly into the U.S. In times of geopolitical and economic uncertainty, our technology empowers companies far beyond Germany to build more resilient procurement operations that safeguard their supply chains and protect their bottom line.”

Next-generation AI-powered procurement

Founded in 2020 by Fabian Heinrich and Moritz Weiermann, Mercanis aims to reshape procurement processes with its Agentic-AI Procurement Suite. The cloud-based platform combines procurement, supplier management, and contract management. Intelligent agents autonomously handle operational tasks, while AI continuously analyzes procurement data to uncover savings opportunities, enhance strategic decisions, and drive measurable results—delivering over 40% process savings, a 2.5x increase in efficiency, and a 12x return on investment.

“Mercanis has transformed the way we manage suppliers and execute procurement projects. What used to take days now takes only hours. The automation and transparency help us act faster and make better decisions – especially when multiple stakeholders are involved. It’s a must-have for any procurement team looking to modernize,” says Uwe Kreplin, Head of Procurement at GASAG.

In addition to GASAG, Mercanis also counts BASF-Coatings, Goldbeck, Wilson, and Brose among its clients.

“Within just a few years, Mercanis has established itself as a trusted partner to multinational firms, with impressive traction across organizations now procuring billions through the platform,” says Philippe Collombel, Founding and General Partner at Partech.

“We are particularly impressed by the strength of their product and its ability to drive adoption at scale,” adds Magda Poslusny, Principal at Partech. “By automating key procurement processes, Mercanis not only boosts operational efficiency but also drives meaningful cost savings by engaging a broader supplier base. We are confident Mercanis is on track to become a category leader in procurement.”

About Mercanis

Mercanis offers an Agentic-Ai Procurement Suite that covers the entire procurement process – from supplier selection to contract signing. The solution includes four key modules: Spend Analytics, Sourcing & Request Processes (RFx), Supplier Management (SRM), and Contract Management. With the integrated Mercu AI Co-Pilot, repetitive tasks like supplier discovery, risk detection, intake management and offer comparison are automated, leading to significant efficiency improvements and over 40% process savings. Founded in 2020 by Fabian Heinrich and Moritz Weiermann, Mercanis supports prominent clients like BASF-Coatings, GASAG, Goldbeck, Wilson, and Brose in digitizing their procurement processes. The company is based in Berlin and currently employs over 40 people.
Learn more at mercanis.com

About Partech

Partech is a global tech investment firm headquartered in Paris, with offices in Berlin, Dakar, Dubai, Nairobi, and San Francisco. Partech brings together capital, operational experience, and strategic support to back entrepreneurs from seed to growth stage. Born in San Francisco 40 years ago, today Partech manages €2.5B AUM and a current portfolio of 220 companies, spread across 40 countries and 4 continents.
Learn more at partechpartners.com

Press Contact

Sabrina Rymarowicz
Zossener Straße 56-58
10961 Berlin
sabrina@get-press.de

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Diskover, Backed by Snowflake Ventures, Empowers Enterprises with Full Visibility into Their Legacy Data Estates

Snowflake

A successful AI strategy requires a solid data foundation, yet a striking number of data and AI leaders are feeling unprepared. According to a survey of executives, a quarter described their data foundations as “somewhat unready” to “very unready” to support generative AI applications, and more than half admit they are only “somewhat ready.”

Compounding this challenge, enterprises are grappling with petabytes of data trapped on legacy storage devices. The lack of visibility into these systems makes it impossible to search for or identify critical information and can cost companies with 100 employees dealing with data around $2.7 million dollars annually. Diskover is at the forefront of tackling this challenge by helping customers find, analyze and enrich data for smart decision-making and quick action — from everyday tasks to advanced AI and data lake applications.

The ability to unlock the value of scattered, unstructured data through global visibility is a key reason we are supporting Diskover through an investment from Snowflake Ventures. Our investment enables a seamless process for our joint customers to identify the most valuable data and enable developers to ingest that data into Snowflake using Snowflake Openflow without rearchitecting or setup.

Customers will be able to access Diskover via Snowflake Marketplace to get better visibility of their data across disparate storage systems such as NetApp, Dell EMC, Vast and DDN, all within their Snowflake environment. Looking ahead, once customers identify critical data using Diskover, they’ll be able to seamlessly replicate it to Snowflake using Openflow, and Diskover is developing the direct connectors to enable customers to do all this from the Diskover interface.

Diskover helps companies pinpoint their most valuable data across legacy storage appliances by delivering a unified view of all of an organization’s data, offering global visibility and searchability and providing features to enhance overall data efficiency. Combined with the power of Snowflake’s easy, trusted and connected platform, our integration will help customers effortlessly ingest their most essential data, bringing clarity and real operational value to build a robust data foundation ready for AI.

Stay tuned to try Diskover Data’s Snowflake connected app, available soon in Snowflake Marketplace.

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MiQ Sigma breaks the fragmentation cycle

Bridgepoint

The first AI platform that unifies the programmatic ecosystem

Technology is built on top of the three largest global LLMs and features an AI agent that transforms 700 trillion data signals into smarter media decisions in seconds

Global programmatic media partner MiQ today announced the launch of MiQ Sigma, a transformative AI-powered advertising technology trained on the world’s most connected data set. Built from the ground up with programmatic excellence at its core, MiQ Sigma unites over 300 diverse data feeds, spanning 700 trillion consumer signals across what consumers are watching on TV, browsing on the web, and buying in stores. Sophisticated AI is used across the platform to improve planning, audience development, and activation, allowing traders to drive market-leading outcomes for brands and agencies.

Having championed an agnostic and unbiased approach to programmatic buying since inception, MiQ Sigma is now the only advertising tool that connects the entire programmatic ecosystem in one place. This unified platform brings together data, technology, and campaign workflows, while applying advanced AI to make smarter decisions with speed. With the help of its Trading Agent, traders can reach valuable audiences across multiple DSP and SSP platforms and through different programmatically-enabled media across any screen. MiQ Sigma fundamentally shifts how brands and advertisers can connect with consumers, providing a level of speed and confidence in delivering results that are unrivaled in today’s fragmented digital landscape.

“Today is not just a launch—it’s the culmination of everything we’ve built over the last 15 years,” said Gurman Hundal, Global CEO and Co-founder of MiQ. “From day one, MiQ has believed in the power of agnostic partnerships, deep data intelligence, and human expertise to drive results. MiQ Sigma is the next evolution of that vision—enhancing core strengths with powerful new technology. In a fragmented and increasingly complex ecosystem, Sigma makes everything we do faster, smarter, and more connected—it’s what powers MiQ to drive market leading outcomes, and gives our teams and clients a serious edge in a rapidly changing market.” 

John Goulding, Global Chief Strategy Officer at MiQ added, “In the past, marketers had to make arbitrary choices around what ad platforms to use for their campaigns, which caused a trade-off in reach and performance. MiQ Sigma is a single-point-of-entry for programmatic advertising where you can harness intelligence, discover audiences, and then use agentic AI to execute multi-platform media buys in a matter of seconds. This is a new paradigm that truly puts results first and allows a well-written prompt to slice through the complexity of our ecosystem.”

In early testing, MiQ Sigma has shown to increase conversion rate by 132% and reduce cost per action by 57%. This is accomplished through key features and functionality built into the technology:

  • Sigma Intelligence. Powerful visualization featuring hundreds of diverse data feeds, spanning ‘watching, browsing and buying’ behaviors of over 1.7 billion global audience profiles, all connected together to provide marketers unmatched reach and insights.
  • Trading Agent. Campaign management and optimization features are supported by an interactive Trading Agent, trained on 15 years of MiQ trading data and underpinned by the three leading LLMs (Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT). Through simple, natural language commands, the agent enables traders to make quicker multi-DSP decisions and take immediate action, automating what used to be manual analysis and improving performance.
  • Gen AI Personas. Custom audience profiles, built by generative-AI and accessed through natural language prompts, bring audience planning to life in seconds. These personas can then form the basis of campaign development, turning insights into actions in minutes.

 

“MiQ Sigma represents a breakthrough for our programmatic strategy and the brands we serve,” said Clive Record, Global President, Partnerships and Solutions, Dentsu. “What makes it so unique isn’t just that it unifies our view of audiences and platforms – it’s how it converts that unified view into smarter decisions across every aspect of campaign management. MiQ Sigma is a genuine step-change that empowers our agency to deliver what truly matters—impactful business outcomes for the world’s leading brands.”

MiQ Sigma’s ecosystem is fueled by integrations with industry leaders including The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Amazon Web Services, Samba, Experian, Databricks, Numerator, Celtra, and Circana – creating an unmatched foundation for programmatic excellence.

“MiQ’s commitment to building AI-driven, agnostic technology aligns with the future of programmatic, where marketers have greater control, flexibility, and performance across every channel,” said Matt Fogarty, GM Channel Partners at The Trade Desk. “As a key integration in Sigma’s development, we’ve worked closely with MiQ to push the boundaries of what’s possible, and we’re committed to supporting this platform as it establishes the new standard for programmatic advertising moving forward.”

MiQ has been supported by investment partner Bridgepoint, one of the world’s leading quoted private asset growth investors, since 2022.

“As the advertising industry continues to mature and embrace the transformative potential of AI, MiQ stands out as a clear leader. This launch represents the culmination of years of innovation, and we’re proud to see MiQ take this next step in scaling its impact across the industry,” said Xavier Robert, Chief Investment Officer at Bridgepoint. “By unifying a fragmented ecosystem with a powerful, AI-led platform, MiQ is not just responding to where the market is going, it’s helping to shape its future.”

MiQ Sigma is available immediately to clients in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and select international markets, with global rollout planned throughout 2025. For more information or to request a demo, visit: www.wearemiq.com/sigma

Bridgepoint Group is one of the world’s leading quoted private asset growth investors, specialising in private equity, infrastructure and private credit.

With over $86 billion of assets under management and a strong local presence in Europe, North America and Asia, we combine global scale with local market insight and sector expertise, consistently delivering strong returns through cycles.

Bridgepoint Advisers Limited, a subsidiary of Bridgepoint Group plc, is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

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