TripleLift, the Creative SSP powered by TL Spark, its agentic intelligence layer, announced the general availability of TL Direct, its new self-serve platform that gives buyers and sellers unified control over curated media outcomes across web, mobile, and connected TV. Having completed a successful beta program with a select group of agencies, publishers, and brands, many of whom have live deals on the platform, TL Direct is now open to the broader market.

TL Direct is designed for speed, precision, and scale. Buyers and sellers can build and launch deals in minutes rather than weeks, with access to TripleLift’s free proprietary behavioral and contextual segments, as well as the industry’s top audience and measurement partners. Publishers can build widely accessible one-to-one private marketplaces, as well as curated deals leveraging first-party data and lookalike modeling, across TripleLift’s network of more than 5,000 direct publisher relationships.

The platform also opens new opportunities for agency curation teams, third-party curators, and commerce media buyers to orchestrate deals with curated supply, high-impact creatives, granular audience targeting, and impact measurement. TL Direct supports UI, API, and MCP-based access, positioning it as a bridge from human-led workflows to agent-led execution, and placing TripleLift at the forefront of agentic programmatic infrastructure.

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Powering TL Direct is TL Spark, TripleLift’s intelligence layer that orchestrates supply, creative, audiences, measurement, and performance as a single unified system. Unlike point solutions that optimize a single variable, TL Spark continuously optimizes across multiple levers simultaneously, from supply selection and format choice to audience matching and outcome signals. Built for agentic transactions, TL Spark moves programmatic beyond isolated automation toward intelligent, continuous optimization at scale.

“TL Direct gives buyers and sellers the necessary control, flexibility and speed, while TL Spark ensures every deal is continuously optimized,” said Dave Helmreich, CEO at TripleLift. “We’re not just making deals and curation easier — we’re making it smarter, more connected, and ready for the agentic future of programmatic. The Beta results are impressive: partners activated quickly, saw real impact, and came back for more.”

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According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact study commissioned by TripleLift, the platform can save an average of 40 hours per campaign through TripleLift’s creative assembly and custom asset development, translating to $357,000 in avoided labor costs over three years. The same study found that TripleLift campaigns deliver a $3.70 return on ad spend and generate $1.3 million in incremental profit from increased advertising value over three years.

Several of the industry’s key agencies, publishers, curators, and brands are already using TL Direct, including Amerge, powered by Podean, Raptive, and Zeroma.

“TL Direct is playing a central role in our expansion into upper funnel solutions,” said John Doyle, CEO at Amerge, powered by Podean. “The Deal UI alone has been a significant step forward, giving our teams efficient access to quality open internet supply at global scale, publisher first-party data, and creative ad formats that consistently outperform standard units. But the broader capabilities of the platform, including data onboarding, ID matching, and advanced curation, are what truly set it apart.”

“Raptive’s publishers deserve deals that are as smart as the content they create,” said Ryan Maynard, SVP Programmatic Sales Operations at Raptive. “TL Direct makes it possible for our team to build, activate, and optimize PMP deals with far less friction than anything we’ve used before. The integration with TripleLift’s supply intelligence means every deal is working harder for our publishers.”

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“The observable web is shrinking, and with machine-generated noise filling the gap, the quality of the signal you start with has never mattered more,” said Will Oatley, Founder and CEO at Zeroma. “TL Direct closes the gap between curation strategy and execution, extending our deterministic, double-verified signals across TripleLift’s supply in a way that preserves what makes them valuable. Brands can now scale declared intent without the signal degradation that typically comes with reach.”

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SurveyMonkey, the world’s most popular platform for surveys and forms, announced SurveyMonkey LaunchPad, a dedicated suite of ready-to-run, automated market research solutions built for marketing and product professionals who need fast, reliable answers before launching products and campaigns.

Every launch starts with a question teams can’t afford to get wrong: will this land with our target audience? But getting reliable market validation has traditionally required teams to wait months and spend heavily on agency-led studies, forcing many to rely on gut instinct or piece together DIY research.

SurveyMonkey LaunchPad changes that with guided, pay-as-you-go research solutions that help teams test product concepts, campaign messaging, pricing, and creative with targeted audiences in a matter of hours, not months. LaunchPad packages the company’s 25-plus years of helping people run research at scale to offer solutions that are uniquely rigorous, accessible, and affordable for modern teams.

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“Companies are under enormous pressure to move faster, but speed without feedback is just guessing,” said Eric Johnson, CEO at SurveyMonkey. “Human feedback matters even more in the age of AI, and teams shouldn’t have to choose between speed, rigor, and budget to validate their ideas before launch. We’ve long offered market research tools that range from autonomous, self-serve tools to professional services engagements. What’s special about LaunchPad is that it guides teams through proven methodologies, even if you don’t have a dedicated research team. Everyone needs that kind of flexibility to move fast with confidence today.”

SurveyMonkey LaunchPad empowers teams with guided setup, where built-in research expertise helps teams launch professional studies powered by proven methods like monadic testing, sequential monadic testing, or Van Westendorp price sensitivity testing, all with complex logic already built in. The platform also offers automated insights without requiring market research expertise, using AI-powered analysis to quickly surface decision-ready findings, professional scorecards, and advanced research outputs like Key Driver analysis, MaxDiff preference scores, and TURF simulations.

A built-in audience panel gives teams access to targeted respondents across demographics, industries, and regions through SurveyMonkey’s integrated global survey panel of more than 335 million respondents in over 130 countries, with more than 200 targeting options, eliminating one of the biggest barriers to market research: finding the right audience. The platform also offers flexible pricing with no subscriptions, allowing teams to purchase studies on a pay-as-you-go basis.

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LaunchPad helps marketers, product teams, and other business professionals run advanced market research without needing deep research expertise. Marketers can test campaign creative and messaging before launch, product managers can validate concepts before investing engineering resources, and growth teams can pressure-test pricing strategies before going to market, all without needing a dedicated insights team or agency partner. LaunchPad includes solutions for concept testing, pricing optimization, ad and message testing, and advanced research methods like MaxDiff and Van Westendorp analysis.

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RainFocus, provider of the next-generation event marketing platform, introduced enhancements to Base Webinar, a centralized solution that eliminates data silos by connecting webinar engagement to a single Global Attendee Profile. As 80% of enterprises struggle to integrate event technology into their marketing stacks, according to Forrester research, Base Webinar provides the immediate speed-to-activation needed to convert digital engagement into measurable pipeline growth.

The enhancements introduce user-friendly professional production tools within the same platform where attendee data lives. Event marketing teams can leverage broadcast-quality streaming with no external tools required, create polished, branded experiences without added complexity, and drive attendee actions with centralized chat, Q&A, and polling functionality.

The fragmentation of event data has historically prevented a holistic view of the customer journey. By treating webinars as a core component of the total event portfolio rather than isolated broadcasts, organizations can close the 35% lead conversion gap, according to Martal, which is typically caused by delayed post-webinar follow-ups.

Part of RainFocus’s Base Module offering, Base Webinar provides one platform to plan, promote, deliver, and measure every webinar. Event organizations can deliver brand consistency at scale, analyze data from in-person, hybrid, and field activities in a single view, and immediately activate sales and pipeline growth with bidirectional integrations.

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Most organizations still manage webinars separately from their broader event strategy, creating duplicate contacts, double opt-ins, and attribution gaps that affect sales opportunities. Webinar tools, event platforms, and CRM platforms are typically three separate record systems with no shared identity, leaving attendees’ brand experience across virtual and in-person programs fragmented.

Base Webinar pushes engagement signals bidirectionally into Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, and HubSpot the moment a session ends. Intent scoring, session duration, and poll data are pre-mapped to existing lead scoring models, giving sales an actionable list as soon as the event ends.

RainFocus integrates webinar attendance data into the Global Attendee Profile, spanning the entire event portfolio, to provide a complete picture of how buyers engage before they’re ready to buy. The platform also applies the client’s design system, including logo, colors, typography, and registration experience, across every event type, so attendees get a consistent experience whether they’re registering for a lunch-and-learn or a global user conference.

Potential use cases for the platform include pipeline generation and lead capture through high-intent webinars designed to attract, engage, and convert prospects; customer retention through content-led sessions focused on product education and building expertise, trust, and retention; thought leadership through large-scale broadcasts aimed at brand authority and audience growth; and business continuity and governance through webinars embedded within a broader event and technology strategy.

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“Most enterprise marketing teams lose momentum because webinar data is trapped in separate systems,” said Brian Gates, EVP of Strategy and Growth at RainFocus. “By pushing rich engagement signals directly into the martech stack the moment a session ends, we enable sales teams to strike while the iron is hot.”

“Webinars are a continuous catalyst for business relationships, not one-off moments,” said JR Sherman, CEO of RainFocus. “By enabling webinar engagement within our Global Attendee Profile, we provide a unified and continuous year-round view of the customer buyer journey.”

Base Webinar features bidirectional integration with martech tools like Salesforce and Marketo, pushing engagement signals like watch time and poll responses directly into Salesforce records and Marketo programs the moment a webinar ends, triggering immediate automated workflows. Unlike legacy webinar tools, which often act as data silos requiring manual uploads to CRMs, Base Webinar is natively part of the broader event strategy, ensuring zero attribution gaps and a consistent brand experience across virtual and in-person environments.

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German AI translation startup DeepL has acquired a US audio streaming startup whose technology helps attendees at conferences and sports events get the same sound experience regardless of where they are sitting.

DeepL has acquired San Francisco-based Mixhalo for an undisclosed sum to improve its AI translation offering.

The acquisition, which follows DeepL’s layoff of around 250 employees last month, means DeepL will open its first office in San Francisco.

Cologne-based DeepL, last valued at $2 billion, is known for its AI text translation and writing tools. It has also recently moved into voice-to-voice translation, and says more than 200,000 businesses use its translation technology.

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Founded in 2016 by two musicians and a technologist, Mixhalo provides AI-powered, real-time sound in numerous languages at live events such as major sports, entertainment, and conference events. Event attendees install the Mixhalo app, connect it to the concert, and plug in their headphones to get the same sound quality wherever they sit, according to Mixhalo.

Its technology has been used at Metallica and Sting concerts, as well as MLB and NASCAR events, and by brands including Verizon and T-Mobile.

Describing the rationale behind the deal, DeepL, which Mixhalo already uses as its main translation provider, said it was integrating ultra-low-latency audio infrastructure into its offering at large-scale events. “This enables translated speech and captions to reach audiences clearly and instantly, from smaller live settings to tens of thousands of attendees, while preserving the pace and natural fluency of live speech,” the company said.

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Mixhalo has raised nearly $40 million, including seed investment from Pharrell Williams, and funding from Founders Fund, Fortress Investment, and Cowboy Ventures.

“The team has solved one of the hardest problems in live audio, which is delivering high-fidelity sound to thousands of people at once with basically zero latency,” said Jarek Kutylowski, founder and CEO of DeepL. “Together, we’re building the real-time Language AI layer for communication, so people can understand each other naturally wherever they are interacting, whether that’s in team meetings, customer calls, or even major international events.”

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Bloomreach, the AI company for personalization, today announced a new Sidekick app extension for its Loomi for Shopify app, which gives merchants instant visibility into their search performance, accessible conversationally within their Shopify admin. Merchants using Loomi for Shopify can ask plain-language questions about their search and merchandising in Sidekick, such as why a specific product is ranking where it is, and receive immediate, query-level insights. Search intelligence is deconstructed in real time, enabling merchants to diagnose and fix issues the moment they arise.

Site merchandisers and e-commerce managers have historically relied on multiple tools to diagnose search ranking behavior, a workflow that interrupts focus and slows decision-making. This new integration eliminates that friction, giving merchants conversational, in-admin visibility into how Loomi, Bloomreach’s agentic personalization platform, determines product rankings and search results. No additional site integration or technical oversight is required.

“Our customers can now have a conversational window into why their search results look the way they do — right inside their Shopify admin,” said Raj De Datta, co-founder and CEO of Bloomreach. “Merchants can ask for insights at an individual query level, and instantly see how Loomi is using spelling, synonyms, and relevance signals to shape their results. This is the power of Sidekick when integrated with the real-time intelligence of Loomi.”

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This functionality also allows merchants to configure Bloomreach search for the first time, validating their setup before going live and accelerating launch readiness. Merchants can ask Sidekick natural-language questions and instantly surface information such as why a specific product ranks in a given position for a query, which merchandising rules, boosts, or exclusions are in effect, whether spell correction or synonym matching has influenced the results, and how relevance, performance, and scoring signals combine for any given result set.

The Sidekick app extension is available now to Bloomreach customers using Loomi for Shopify.

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Salesforce announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin, formerly Intercom, an industry-leading customer agent company. Under the terms of the agreement, Salesforce will acquire Fin for approximately $3.6 billion, subject to customary purchase price adjustments.

Fin’s core offering, its AI Agent, resolves complex customer queries end-to-end, across every channel, including live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone, and Slack. The AI Agent is powered by the company’s proprietary AI model, Apex, which is purpose-built for customer support and has demonstrated industry-leading resolution rates that outperform top commercially available frontier models.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Fin to Salesforce as we enable every company to become an agentic enterprise,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. “Fin brings proven agent technology, a deep commitment to customer success, and an incredible AI team that will complement Agentforce with powerful service agent capabilities. Together, we’ll help companies of every size seize this opportunity — accelerating time to value with trusted agents that deliver measurable outcomes at scale.”

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“This is a major win for consumers of the world,” said Eoghan McCabe, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Fin. “Our technology has defined this category and set the new standards for what great customer service looks like today. By joining forces with Salesforce, we can deploy it far and wide at a rate far faster than we could have ever achieved on our own.”

Building on the strength of Agentforce, which reached $1.2 billion in ARR in Q1 FY27, up 205% year-over-year, Fin’s packaged offerings and proprietary models will complement Agentforce’s deeply customizable platform with additional fast-to-value deployment options for service organizations.

Upon close, Salesforce and Fin will give customers more ways to deploy AI agents across their customer service operations, with fast time-to-value options especially well-suited for SMB and some commercial organizations that need to launch quickly, integrate with existing systems, and deliver measurable outcomes. Together, Salesforce and Fin will support customers at every stage of AI adoption, from rapidly deployable support agents to more tailored, enterprise-scale transformations built on trusted data, security, governance, and integration.

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Fin’s AI agent technology will help organizations improve autonomous resolution, reduce cost-to-serve, and accelerate AI adoption across their service organizations. The AI Agent has already demonstrated strong customer outcomes, including examples of AI agents resolving on average 76% of support volume end-to-end. The acquisition will also bring a long-tenured technical AI team and an established global customer base of more than 30,000 companies to Salesforce.

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Rob Hall, co-founder of Playground xyz, the attention-based advertising platform acquired by GumGum in 2021, announced his return to adtech with the launch of Parallel, an industry-first platform introducing Customer Suitability — a new approach to media buying that aims to bring the voice of the customer into every advertising impression.

Launched in Sydney and London, Parallel allows brands to quantify and optimize resonance — the fit between a customer, an ad, and the content they’re viewing — across live advertising campaigns.

While brand safety and brand suitability help advertisers avoid harmful environments and align campaigns with brand values, Customer Suitability asks a question the industry has never systematically answered: not just whether a video placement is right for a brand, but whether it is right for the customer viewing it. The development marks an essential new addition to the industry’s core targeting toolkit, for brands that want their ads to truly resonate.

Rob Hall, CEO of Parallel, said: “Today, impressions are checked for brand safety and brand suitability — but never for whether they’re right for the customer. That’s Customer Suitability: the missing piece, and the one Parallel set out to solve.

“Using the customer’s voice as a signal adds huge value to the millions of activation decisions brands make every day. Delivered via human-calibrated digital twins, we simulate and score the resonance between a customer, an ad, and the content it runs against, then push that into real-time activation.”

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Parallel combines proprietary AI, large-scale datasets, and digital twins — synthetic replicas of consumers used elsewhere to test and predict outcomes across industries, including healthcare, aviation, and manufacturing — to bring the customer’s perspective directly into the bidstream. The technology is focused on video environments and platforms.

Parallel’s digital twins achieve 80.4% accuracy when compared with real human responses. They can answer millions of questions in seconds, allowing brands to simulate customer reactions to creative and content combinations at scale. Hall describes the technology as “a virtual focus group that happens before every impression you buy.”

Industry research from IAS shows that optimizing for creative and content fit can deliver 4 times higher unaided recall, 2 times higher favourability, and 1.5 times higher receptivity.

“Backtests against our simulations show positive gains to media metrics, brand lift, and conversion rates,” Hall said. “We’re on the first step of a big journey, but, as we hoped, our notion of Customer Suitability, in addition to driving more positive advertising generally, can also be linked to positive outcomes. Happily, it seems that what works for your customers works for your brand too.”

Parallel optimizes for resonance by using a brand’s creative assets and audience inputs to match with 1,000 AU- or UK-calibrated human digital twins, or brands can bring their own audience data. The platform simulates how different customer segments respond to creative across a wide range of video content, assigns each customer-creative-content combination a resonance score supported by qualitative and quantitative rationale, ranks combinations to prioritize the highest-resonance opportunities within the media buy, and continuously re-scores and re-optimizes campaigns as new content becomes available.

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The transformative value of customer preference data in the media buying and planning process has been widely discussed by brands and their agencies in recent years. Jack Cantwell, Global Client Lead at Dentsu, said: “One powerful lever for creating meaningful competitive advantage is by gaining a high-resolution and dynamic understanding of audiences — and another is agile execution. Parallel is well-positioned to help brands maximize the value of their data and capitalize on algorithmic opportunities — creating impact through the full marketing value chain.”

Dan Glynn, Media Buying Lead at Heineken, added: “Bringing the customer’s voice into media decision-making has the potential to make advertising more relevant for consumers and more effective for brands.”

Hall co-founded Playground XYZ in Sydney in 2015. The company rapidly expanded globally, establishing offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland, Singapore, London, New York, and Los Angeles. Like Playground xyz, Parallel is backed by Sydney-based venture capital firm Shearwater Capital, which has invested AU$4 million in the new venture as part of a seed round.

Zac Zavos, Managing Partner at Shearwater Capital, said: “Rob stands out globally as one of the true leaders in adtech. Playground xyz shaped how a whole industry thinks about Attention in digital media. Along the way, he and the team built a great business that we were fortunate to back. With Parallel, they have again made a breakthrough for brand advertisers. Consumer Suitability is the ideal metric to optimize toward right now and we were excited by the depth of technology and data science the Parallel team has brought to life. We are thrilled to be back again as the company launches in two markets concurrently.”

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Parallel launches with a six-person team based in London and Sydney. In London, Hall is joined by Ben Dimond, UK Managing Director, and Billy Gittins, Senior Sales Lead.

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Gucci has been announced as the title partner to the Alpine team from 2027, with the squad set to race under the name of Gucci Racing Alpine Formula One Team from the start of next season.

As part of the collaboration, the luxury fashion house is creating Gucci Racing, which they have stated will be “a new business and experiential platform built around the values of performance, precision, discipline, and excellence at the intersection of luxury and sport.”

The new era will also see the team compete in Gucci colors, marking a step away from their current blue and pink livery.

Alpine’s Executive Advisor, Flavio Briatore, said: “Partnering with a prestigious brand of Gucci’s caliber in Formula 1 as title partner of Alpine Formula One Team is something I am incredibly proud of.

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“Not only that, but I am also excited about the possibilities the partnership with Gucci brings and the great things we can achieve together at a global level. The Enstone Team has a history of doing things differently from others and has previously shown that fashion can finish first in Formula 1.

“With the improved performance on track, and Alpine having its best-ever points total to start a season, this new collaboration with Gucci shows the growing momentum behind the team. I would like to thank Luca [de Meo] and Francesca for their trust and dedication in the project and for helping make this partnership come to life.”

Francesca Bellettini, President and Chief Executive Officer of Gucci, added: “This partnership with Alpine Formula One Team writes a new chapter: Gucci becomes the first luxury fashion house to serve as Title Partner in Formula 1.

“That reflects our ambition for the brand and the role we want Gucci to play on this stage. Formula 1 represents today a unique convergence of performance, culture, and global reach, and Alpine Formula One Team is the right partner to bring this vision to life.

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“Gucci Racing is more than a presence on the grid. It is an expression of who we are and where we want to take the brand. And there is much more to come. We are grateful to Alpine and the entire Renault Group for sharing this ambition with us.”

The news comes amid a good start to the 2026 season for Alpine, with the squad rising from the bottom of the standings in 2025 to currently sit fifth in the Teams’ Championship.

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Lachlan Murdoch‘s Fox Corp. and streaming tech powerhouse Roku have entered a definitive agreement under which Fox will acquire Roku for $160 per share, in a cash-and-Fox Class A common stock transaction that values Roku at approximately $22 billion in enterprise value, the companies said Monday.

The transaction combines Fox’s sports, news, and entertainment content with the Tubi streaming service, Roku’s connected TV platform, The Roku Channel, first-party data, and a direct relationship with more than 100 million global streaming households, the deal partners said.

On a call with analysts, Murdoch, executive chair and CEO of Fox, called the acquisition a “defining moment” for his company, one that “pairs Fox, the leader in live news and sports, with Roku, the leading connected TV platform. This acquisition will strengthen and expand our position in the high-growth digital video ecosystem and unlock new ways to serve our audiences and partners.”

“Nothing has the upside and the massive scale and opportunity that the transaction has,” Murdoch added. The Roku acquisition follows Fox’s 2020 acquisition of Tubi, and, according to the Fox boss, continues a strategy of “focus over scale for scale’s sake” that avoids the media giant getting caught up in the streaming industry arms race.

“Our achievements give us great confidence in our ability to enhance growth inside the enlarged Fox Corporation,” Murdoch added. He told analysts Roku will help Fox navigate a fast-evolving streaming sector, including the continued distribution of Fox and Tubi content: “We are seeing a clear consumer preference for aggregation. Consumers are gravitating towards simpler, more unified experiences on their favorite platforms like Roku.”

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On a pro forma basis, the combined company will become the third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing, “with an attractive mix of Fox’s sports, news, and entertainment content, alongside streaming services Tubi and The Roku Channel,” the companies said. “That distribution and engagement scale spans every major viewing environment — broadcast, cable, local, and streaming — creating broad and diversified reach that benefits viewers, partners, and advertisers.”

Anthony Wood, founder, chairman, and CEO of Roku, also on the analyst call, said his company was entering the transaction from a position of strength. “Put simply, it’s the best way to accelerate our long-term strategy and continue shaping the future of television,” he said.

“It’s a great price,” Wood added of the rationale for doing the deal at this time. “It allows us to execute on our strategy faster than we would otherwise by ourselves, even though we’re doing extremely well,” he said when asked why Roku entered into the transaction now.

Roku reaches over 100 million households globally with its streaming viewership technology built from the ground up. “We believe Roku and Fox will together be uniquely positioned to deliver the value, personalization, and simplicity that viewers want,” Wood said.

The deal follows Roku’s strategic review, which settled on Fox as the preferred bidder. “The Fox offer was the right offer for our shareholders, and we ran a very complete process and are very happy with the outcome,” Wood told analysts about the formal sales process.

The companies highlighted several strategic benefits of the deal. One is increased scale and reach, with the firms noting that together, they will “encompass premium live content, broad distribution, and significant audience reach across linear and streaming,” Fox said in an earlier statement.

Murdoch said Roku would remain an open platform for a connected TV service after the transaction closes, rivaling streamers like Netflix and Prime Video. “It is essential that Roku remains an open and partner-friendly business,” he said. Wood added: “We know how to promote our own services, as well as promote our partner services, and so we intend to continue doing that.”

Fox will take on $8 billion in new debt to fund the transaction, which at closing is expected to give Fox shareholders 73 percent ownership of the combined companies. Roku shareholders will retain the remaining 27 percent stake. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027 and deliver $400 million in cost synergies.

Murdoch said it was too early to measure how the Roku deal would impact Fox’s distribution of sports rights across its broadcast and cable properties. “The discovery of those sports rights can really be assisted with distribution across Roku and discovery through the Roku home screen,” he added.

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“We weren’t focused particularly on sports rights in this transaction, but absolutely, the combination of Fox and Roku, we really think can expand the reach of all our premium content,” Murdoch said. He also said the transaction will boost the distribution of Fox content, helping ratings and advertising revenue. “The advertising synergies and revenue upsides are significant,” he told analysts.

Roku is also expected to accelerate Fox’s push into international markets, including its recent expansion into Latin America, after focusing on the U.S. market. The deal is in line with Murdoch’s recent comments about possible acquisitions, given the company’s healthy balance sheet.

The Fox and Roku brands will be kept separate after the two companies combine, in order to “continue to serve their viewers in the way they do now,” Murdoch said, adding that Fox will remain neutral about distributing third-party content across its platforms.

Wood said the audiences for Roku and Fox are different because content is delivered on different platforms and technologies, pointing to “Fox’s commitment to letting Roku continue to do what it does,” along with additional growth capital. “I would expect that we can grow our viewership in the U.S. with a combination of Roku technology, the Roku platform, and tremendous content that’s on the Roku channel, and the content that Fox brings to it as well,” Murdoch said.

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On Friday, LightShed Partners analyst Rich Greenfield cited Fox as a potential acquirer of Roku. “Given how tied Fox is to the legacy TV ecosystem, a Roku acquisition would enable Fox to meaningfully reposition its narrative with investors toward a streaming future that began with its Tubi acquisition,” he said, adding that “it was worth noting that Fox sold its 6 million shares of Roku at $58 back in 2020 to help finance the acquisition of Tubi. In turn, it would definitely be ironic if Fox bought Roku now.”

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Databricks announced CustomerLake, a new agentic Customer Data Platform (CDP) built natively on Databricks that unifies customer data, AI models, agents, identity resolution, audience building, and activation.

CustomerLake equips marketers and data teams with a workforce of agents that continuously analyze behavior, decide, and act, delivering always-on personalized customer experiences a billion times a day. The platform brings the CDP natively into Databricks, where customer data, AI models, and agents already reside. Built on the lakehouse and governed by Unity Catalog, it consolidates customer data, identity resolution, audience building, campaign automation, and activation into a single AI-native foundation.

The announcement, made at Databricks’ Data + AI Summit, marks the company’s continued expansion into major enterprise software categories, following Lakewatch, a security lakehouse. CustomerLake is now available in Private Preview, with current customers including HP, Circle K, AB InBev, and Getnet by Santander.

Marketing teams are facing two simultaneous shifts. They are now marketing to agents that consumers deploy on their behalf to research, evaluate, and transact, and they are rebuilding their own marketing stack to be run by agents. Traditional martech wasn’t built for either. Legacy CDPs follow a waterfall model: campaigns are planned and executed across dozens of disconnected systems, take weeks to ship, and leave customer data siloed outside the company’s core AI platform. That fractures identity and makes true personalization difficult at scale.

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Agents need something different: real-time access to context, data, and execution in one place. CustomerLake delivers this by bringing the CDP natively into the Databricks platform, so the same models that generate insight can drive activation directly.

“Marketers need to reimagine their entire foundation — not just the campaigns they run, but the customers they run them for, which now include agents,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks. “With CustomerLake, customer data, AI models, and agents live in one governed platform. Marketing stops being a series of campaigns and becomes a continuous loop — agents that constantly analyze, decide, and act on every customer in real time. For the first time, enterprises can deliver infinity campaigns and 1:1 personalization at scale.”

The agentic CDP is a new category of marketing infrastructure built for a world where buyer behavior is changing. Humans are deploying AI agents to compare and buy on their behalf, and marketers are deploying agents to engage with them. Unlike legacy CDPs, an agentic CDP puts governed customer context, AI models, and execution capability in a single environment. The result is a system that doesn’t wait for a marketer to trigger a campaign — it continuously analyzes, decides, and acts. With CustomerLake, the models that generate customer insights are the same models that drive activation, with no data copies, no pipeline lag, and no governance tradeoffs.

CustomerLake’s features include always-on “infinity campaigns” that replace one-off campaigns with continuous, agent-driven engagement so every customer can receive a 1:1 experience; campaign agents that enable marketers to build audiences, automate campaigns, and personalize experiences directly from their data foundation regardless of where it’s stored; profile agents that turn raw customer data into business-ready records through an end-to-end agentic loop; an open partner ecosystem to ingest and activate data across leading platforms, including Adobe, Meta, Acxiom, Epsilon, LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, Braze, Bloomreach, Iterable, Snapchat, Magnite, TransUnion, Adstra, Twilio, Integral Ad Science, and Unity; native integrations and reverse ETL connecting Databricks with bi-directional pipelines to the marketing and advertising technology stack; agentic identity resolution that combines rules and agents to unify disconnected records into more accurate customer profiles; and a built-in identity marketplace to enrich profiles with third-party identity graphs and partner data from providers such as Acxiom, Epsilon, LiveRamp, TransUnion, and Adstra.

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“At HP, we believe the future of AI-driven customer engagement depends on moving beyond fragmented customer data toward governed customer context,” said Kumar Ram, Global Head of Marketing Technology and AI Enablement at HP. “Databricks CustomerLake brings that vision to life, enabling HP to build customer intelligence, personalization, and activation on the data foundation we already trust, rather than creating another place where data must be copied, reconciled, and secured. With CustomerLake, marketing can move faster, operate smarter, and transform with AI using the same trusted customer context as finance, product, sales, and operations.”

“At Circle K, our loyalty and marketing teams rely extensively on Databricks to drive customer engagement,” said Jay Malepati, Global Director, Customer & Marketing Data Science at Circle K. “CustomerLake is proving to be a major unlock for our architecture because it allows us to build targeted audiences natively in Databricks, activate them seamlessly in Adobe, and measure downstream campaign impact without moving our entire data lake into another platform. This gives our teams a faster, more governed path from customer data to campaign execution and fundamentally changes our speed to market.”

“At Getnet by Santander, strong merchant relationships are at the core of how we grow,” said Ainhoa Alonso, Chief Data and AI Officer at Getnet by Santander. “As a global payments business operating across multiple markets, channels, and customer needs, CRM is a strategic growth engine: helping us understand our clients better, engage them more meaningfully, and create more consistent experiences at scale. Databricks CustomerLake will help us advance this ambition by enabling a trusted, actionable Customer 360, bringing together customer intelligence, data, and AI in a governed and interoperable way with our CRM and activation ecosystem.”

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“As a launch partner for Databricks CustomerLake, The Trade Desk is helping marketers make their data more actionable across the open internet,” said Jay Goebel, VP of Data Partnerships at The Trade Desk. “Together, we’re enabling marketers to connect trusted, deterministic data and agentic AI with media execution, giving brands a faster path from customer insights to action so they can reach the right audiences, improve relevance, and drive measurable outcomes with greater control over their data.”

“Unity’s mobile ecosystem includes 256M monthly active users in the US and 2.85B globally, offering one of the most unique first-party engagement signals for brands to reach consumers in the state of play,” said Chris Feo, SVP Sales and Partnerships at Unity. “By integrating with Databricks CustomerLake, brand marketers can activate their trusted customer intelligence directly within Unity’s high-attention, brand-safe mobile video inventory. This connection makes Unity inventory addressable from the data foundation brands already managed in Databricks, with performance measurement flowing back to the same place.”

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