Welcome to the latest edition of the World of DaaS Roundup.
Data showed up in some unexpected places this week. Google started paying publishers for the content powering its AI, Salesforce made a $2B bet on customer research, Databricks bought a spreadsheet startup, and a new global index is putting numbers behind the data economy.
And there’s plenty happening inside the World of DaaS community too, from members worth knowing to conversations and opportunities happening beyond the headlines.
Here’s what stood out. 👇🏻
📰 News & Reads
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT ⭐️
World of DaaS member BC Wilson, COO of Sequentum, explains why using Claude at runtime breaks institutional data programs. The same prompt sent to an LLM five times produces completely different code on 75.8% of benchmark problems. At temperature=0, 43.6% still diverge.
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT ⭐️
World of DaaS member Jonathan Bloch, CEO, has led EDI for over 30 years delivering corporate actions data across 150+ global markets.
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT ⭐️
World of DaaS member Rob Sanchez and his team surveyed 221 UK B2B marketers and found that while 81% grew revenue this year, only 34% have data that's proven in pipeline. The gap between performance and proof is real.
INDUSTRY NEWS 🚀
Let’s build something amazing.
Whitney Menarcheck, Head of Community & Operations at World of DaaS.
We're excited to introduce Whitney Menarcheck, our new Head of Community & Operations at World of DaaS.
Whitney will be helping us build an even stronger community and member experience, while keeping everything behind the scenes moving forward.
An Unexpected Data Read For Today.
Every time you walk through a park, wait at a crosswalk, or drive past a camera, you may be contributing to a dataset.
MIT's Senseable City Lab just published a book on how visual AI is turning cities into massive real-time datasets, measuring emissions by block, analyzing who uses public spaces and when, and tracking urban life at a scale never before possible.
London has 210 cameras per square mile. Shanghai has over 5,000.
"Each image is a dataset." And most people generating that data don't know it exists.
MIT News
Where Data Meets Art
Photo: Robert Gerhardt, © Museum of Modern Art, New York
What happens when museums put their data to work?
Museums are using AI to connect collections, surface hidden relationships and create new ways for visitors to experience art. The Art Newspaper looks at what happens when decades of cultural data become part of the museum experience.
🔥 In Case You Missed It…
M&A Funding Roundup
Salesforce acquired Listen Labs for ~$2B to bring AI-powered customer research and human simulation into Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud.
Databricks acquired Row Zero to integrate governed, live-data spreadsheets into Genie, its AI coworker for enterprise data teams.
Firecrawl raised $75M Series B led by Smash Capital to scale its web data API and launch Alexandria, a knowledge library for AI agents.
F2 received a $5M strategic investment from Golub Capital to deploy its agentic AI platform across private credit investment workflows.
Menos AI raised $5.1M Pre-A led by Copper Sky Capital to build the institutional intelligence context layer for AI-native asset managers.
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Till next time,
The World of DaaS Team.
