Jonathan Sills

Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Newton Research’s oversubscribed $9M Series A, alongside Greycroft, Bessemer Venture Partners, S4S Ventures, and LiveRamp Ventures. Newton is redefining what agentic AI can do for marketing analytics, enabling brands and agencies to: - Run customer 360 journey analysis across touchpoints - Segment audiences and build predictive models - Automate attribution, incrementality, and media mix modeling - Generate dynamic, natural language-driven reporting - Save up to 126 hours/month and achieve 10x analytics output Their pre-built “blueprints” let non-technical teams securely run advanced analytics on their own data with just a few clicks. John Hoctor, Matthew Emans, and Steven Bennett have successfully built and exited multiple companies. We love to back repeat founders on their most ambitious ideas, like Newton Research. Link to more in comments.

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Super excited to announce that UserEvidence has acquired Zealot, and raised an additional $7M (bringing our total to $21M) to fuel our product development and help B2B enterprises deliver customer proof across the entire funnel - from customer evidence, to advocate engagement, and 1:1 references. When Ray Rhodes and I met Sam Farber, Srikar Chava, and Brandon Jakobson back in May - we were instantly stoked on the potential. Their product instincts, speed, creativity, AI-native approach to building, and the incredible traction they had made in a short amount of time blew us away. Big congrats to the Zealot team! Customer content, advocate engagement, and reference management are not inherently distinct concepts. In fact, they are inextricably related and supportive of each other. Yet - there were different technologies in each of these 3 pillars, and arms-length integrations often fell short of their potential. Bringing these 3 pillars together under the same platform creates a massive opportunity for #customermarketers to holistically engage and harness and organizations most important asset - their customers. In an age of increasing noise and complexity when it comes to choosing the right vendor - substantive, credible, specific proof - whether delivered as content or delivered through live connection with a reference - is going to be the key to inspiring buyer confidence. Customer Marketers will be at the center of the organization, and UE + Zealot will power the future of #customermarketing Read more about the news here - https://lnkd.in/gd5Dygu8

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The race to agentic commerce is a relay. Partnerships across the entire customer journey are driving agentic commerce from pilots to scale. This is accelerating adoption and determining who sets the standards and owns customer relationships as the space matures. Four companies have emerged as the gravitational centers of AI commerce: OpenAI - The infrastructure leader with 16 partnerships since 2024, plus a $1.1B acquisition of Statsig to expand its commerce capabilities. Google - Scaling through major brand partnerships (Home Depot, Behr, Alaska Airlines) by embedding AI assistants directly into their platforms. Shopify - Strategically positioned to own the checkout layer by integrating Shop Pay with OpenAI and Perplexity. Perplexity - The emerging integrator, connecting the customer journey through AI-powered discovery and search. The fragmented nature of AI commerce tools makes partnerships essential. No single company is building everything needed for complete autonomous shopping. Success requires: -AI models for understanding and prediction -Data infrastructure for processing and insights -Selling platforms for transactions -Payment rails for secure, frictionless checkout Companies are discovering that strategic partnerships allow them to accelerate AI adoption without building everything in-house, while accessing specialized capabilities across the tech stack. While public launches remain limited, major payment networks are quietly laying groundwork for the future. Visa has partnered with AI firms including Anthropic and IBM to integrate AI capabilities into its Intelligent Commerce platform. Mastercard and PayPal are developing similar agentic payment systems. The complex requirements for autonomous payments – including authentication, fraud detection, and consumer trust – position incumbent networks as essential partners in the ecosystem. We are moving toward a world where AI agents can discover products, compare options, and complete purchases autonomously. These partnerships will determine who controls the customer relationship.

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Too often, the debate around AI in the workplace is framed around replacement rather than empowerment. From my perspective, the technology has the potential to do much more than remove repetitive work: it can guide, support, and even coach the next generation of professionals. In my recent piece for Business Reporter, I shared why cutting graduate roles in response to automation is, in my view, a short-sighted move. Entry-level positions have always been the foundation for developing expertise, and without them, firms risk weakening the very talent pipeline that secures long-term success. By embedding AI in the right way, junior staff can be freed from low-value tasks and supported to accelerate their learning. More importantly, AI can be trained by senior professionals to capture and share their expertise, turning it into a coach that helps the next generation grow and take on meaningful responsibilities earlier in their careers. For me, AI is not about pushing people aside, but about creating the conditions for knowledge to be passed on more effectively, so that individuals can do their best work and develop into the experts that clients and organisations rely on. Read the full article below ⬇️

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