Shein is officially on the path to acquiring Everlane, both companies have just confirmed, after much industry speculation. The ultra-fast-fashion giant will buy a majority stake in Everlane from LVMH-backed private equity firm L Catterton for an undisclosed amount, pending regulatory approval.

As Puck reported in March, L Catterton had been on the hunt for an investor, hoping to clear about $90 million of debt Everlane had amassed. This included a $25 million loan from investment firm Gordon Brothers and a $65 million asset-based revolving credit line. Regarding the debt, the companies say they do not comment on market speculation.

Also Read: Your CX Partner Is a Revenue Engine. Treat It Like One.

The news comes after almost a week of intense speculation, with leaks, unconfirmed reports, and hot takes swirling. Behind the scenes, Shein and Everlane were busy with due diligence.

Everlane employees were officially informed on Friday morning. In a message to staff — obtained by Vogue Business — Everlane CEO Alfred Chang addressed the moral conflict many might have felt about the change in ownership. “This past week has been a hard one. Seeing our company in the media, and in that light, was painful. Needing to stay silent per the standard process in these matters has been even harder. I want you to know I’ve felt the weight of that alongside you,” he wrote. “I want to be clear: Everlane remains Everlane. I will continue as CEO, our leadership team will stay in place, and we’ll continue operating independently, with our design standards, brand philosophy, and values intact.. Moving forward, Everlane will unlock key opportunities by increasing our competitive advantage and reaching more customers around the world.”

The Everlane sale marks a pivotal shift for the sustainable fashion movement. For many, Everlane represents the optimistic millennial ideal that consumers could shop their way to sustainability. With its sale comes the overdue acknowledgment that customer behavior alone will not push the fashion system towards better practices; that sustainability cannot rely on the moral argument to justify its price premiums; and that deeper, political action is needed to raise the baseline of the entire industry rather than pinning everything on a well-intentioned but under-resourced minority.

Some experts say that there could be benefits to this unlikely alliance. Shein — whose emissions are skyrocketing — is highly stigmatized in the industry, despite many brands sharing similar practices. But the company has always responded to criticisms that its business model drives overproduction by pointing to its data-driven, on-demand supply chain — an ecosystem Everlane could now plug into. This could unlock greater operational efficiency and drive meaningful impact if companies align their growth expectations with absolute emissions reductions.

Also Read: Protecting Loyal Customers From Your Own Return Policies

“Like many brands, we’ve faced increasing pressure in a rapidly changing retail landscape. This partnership allows us to remain independent, and gives us the stability and resources to make a larger impact, without compromising on the quality and standards that make Everlane, Everlane,” said Chang. “It means we can invest more in our product, innovation, our people, and our craft — ultimately delivering on our founding mission to make everything that Everlane stands for more accessible.”

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Sprinklr, an AI-native platform for Unified Customer Experience Management (Unified-CXM), today announced the acquisition of ViralMoment’s assets, an AI-powered social video intelligence and analytics solution, strengthening Sprinklr’s leadership in modern, multimodal customer intelligence.

Social has become video-first — and increasingly image-led—with the majority of engagement and influence now driven by short-form video and visual storytelling across platforms like TikTok, Reels, and YouTube. Yet most listening and Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs remain text-centric, leaving brands with a growing blind spot as critical customer signals embedded in visuals and audio go largely untapped.

“Modern listening requires understanding customers the way they actually communicate today —visually, emotionally, and at speed,” said Karthik Suri, Chief Product and Corporate Strategy Officer at Sprinklr. “While short-form video is becoming one of the dominant formats for brand engagement and discovery, most solutions still interpret culture through text. We believe that this acquisition allows us to advance our AI-native platform with the ability to ‘see’, interpret, and reason across video, imagery, and audio — unlocking a new generation of agentic AI systems grounded in real-world customer context.”

Also Read: Why the CMO Now Owns the Privacy Problem

ViralMoment was purpose-built for this new reality. Its video-native AI analyzes content frame by frame across visuals, audio, and on-screen text — cutting through the noise of modern platforms to uncover emerging trends, creative patterns, and cultural narratives as they form – turning video into structured, actionable customer intelligence.

“We built ViralMoment around the belief that modern social requires a fundamentally different approach to listening to and understanding customers,” said Chelsie Hall, Chief Executive Officer at ViralMoment. “Joining Sprinklr allows us to bring that capability into an enterprise platform built to operationalize those insights at scale — helping customers move from fragmented visibility to a more complete understanding of how culture and behavior evolve.”

With this acquired technology, Sprinklr’s customers will be able to:

• Detect emerging cultural and market trends earlier through video- and image-native intelligence
• Understand not just what content performs, but why it resonates
• Capture customer sentiment and product feedback expressed visually
• Activate insights across marketing, insights, product, and service teams in real time

Also Read: The CIO Who Says Governance Can Actually Speed Up AI

By combining ViralMoment’s video intelligence with Sprinklr’s enterprise-grade Unified-CXM and VoC platform, Sprinklr believes it will deliver the industry’s most complete multimodal listening and insights system — spanning text, images, video, and audio — and operationalized directly within enterprise workflows at scale. This will uniquely position Sprinklr as a partner of choice to help brands move from fragmented insights to comprehensive customer understanding — anticipating cultural shifts, informing decisions, and driving business outcomes.

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Kopa.ai, an agentic AI platform for e-commerce teams, has raised €2 million in seed funding, co-led by XTX Ventures and Practica Capital, with participation from Inovia Capital and angel investor Etan Ilfeld.

The company is building what it describes as an operating system for e-commerce businesses, designed to help teams delegate operational and analytical work to AI agents that can understand context, make decisions, and execute tasks autonomously.

Founded by a team with more than a decade of hands-on e-commerce experience, Kopa.ai is built on the idea that running a successful online business requires thousands of expert decisions every week. Rather than focusing solely on automation, the platform aims to enable merchants to delegate work to AI agents, just as they would rely on experienced internal operators.

Also Read: Why the CMO Now Owns the Privacy Problem

Kopa.ai connects directly to a merchant’s existing tools and storefront, continuously analyzing product, campaign, inventory, customer behavior, and site performance. Based on this understanding, its AI agents identify opportunities to improve business performance and take action accordingly — including generating creatives, adjusting campaigns, reallocating budgets, or publishing updates across connected systems.

The platform is designed to interpret intent rather than rely on prompts or predefined workflows. Teams provide high-level objectives, while the system determines how to execute them. Actions can run with human approval or autonomously, depending on customer preferences.

According to the company, every action and outcome feeds back into the system, allowing the AI to improve its judgment and execution over time through a continuous cycle of analysis, decision-making, execution and learning.

Also Read: E-commerce Doesn’t Have a Data Problem. It Has a Speed One.

According to Donatas Benaitis, founder of Kopa.ai, many e-commerce businesses have the potential to scale significantly faster, but are often slowed down by increasing operational complexity:

We’re building Kopa.ai to feel like handing work to your best expert – someone who understands what you’re trying to achieve from just a few words, makes smart decisions on your behalf, and delivers results that are often even better than you imagined.

Unlike point solutions focused on individual functions such as advertising, analytics or inventory management, Kopa.ai takes a broader approach across the entire e-commerce operation. Under the hood, the company is developing proprietary systems for structuring business knowledge, managing operational context and orchestrating specialized AI agents at scale.

The newly raised funding will be used to further develop the company’s core AI infrastructure, improve the intelligence and reliability of its agents, and expand its go-to-market efforts.

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ComplyAdvantage, a financial crime compliance software company, has launched an upgraded payment screening product built on its AI-native Mesh platform, promising financial institutions faster sanctions checks and fewer false positives across a broader range of payment types.

The move completes the migration of the company’s existing payment screening capability into Mesh, a unified compliance platform it introduced last year. The integration means that payment screening now sits alongside transaction monitoring and customer risk scoring in a single system, giving compliance analysts a complete view of a customer’s history when reviewing a flagged transaction — rather than having to switch between separate tools.

The practical problem the product is designed to solve is a familiar tension in financial services: instant payment networks require near-real-time decisions, but sanctions lists change constantly and the consequences of missing a hit are severe. ComplyAdvantage says its system screens transactions across bank, card, remittance and crypto rails at low latency, with sanctions data updated in minutes rather than hours because the company controls its data pipeline from source to alert.

Two features are positioned as the most operationally significant. The first is a no-code interface that allows compliance teams to adjust match sensitivity and manage internal watchlists without involving engineering staff — a meaningful change for institutions that currently queue regulatory updates behind development backlogs. The second is what the company calls intelligent muting, a system that identifies and suppresses repeated false positives so analysts can concentrate on genuine threats rather than relitigating the same erroneous matches.

Also Read: E-commerce Doesn’t Have a Data Problem. It Has a Speed One.

Alert fatigue is a well-documented problem in financial crime compliance. Analysts at large institutions can review thousands of flagged transactions daily, the vast majority of which turn out to be legitimate. Systems that reduce that noise without increasing the risk of missing real sanctions violations are in strong demand, particularly as regulators at bodies including the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, the United Kingdom’s HM Treasury and Singapore’s Monetary Authority have tightened enforcement expectations.

“By upgrading our payment screening capability to reside natively within this environment, we are giving our customers a strategic advantage,” said Mark Watson, ComplyAdvantage’s chief product and technology officer. “They can now intercept risk at industry-leading speeds with a system that reduces the operational friction and alert fatigue that traditionally hinder business growth.”

ComplyAdvantage says more than 3,000 enterprises across 75 countries use its platform.

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SurveyMonkey has extended its sponsorship partnership with Williams Formula 1 driver Alex Albon through the remainder of the 2026 season, the companies announced Thursday, building on a first year that generated results the partnership’s organizers describe as well above expectations.

The renewal keeps SurveyMonkey branding on Albon’s helmet at select race weekends and continues fan engagement activations across the remaining Grands Prix. Under the arrangement, Albon uses SurveyMonkey’s platform to poll his global fanbase — more than 6.6 million social media followers — on content ideas, merchandise preferences, and race-weekend experiences, feeding responses back into decisions about how he engages with his audience.

The 2025 campaign, which produced three video activations built around fan interaction, generated 61.6 million total impressions and 3.6 million engagements, for an engagement rate of 5.86 percent — a figure the partners say significantly exceeded their benchmarks.

“SurveyMonkey gave us the tools to really listen — to understand what our fans want, what they care about, and how to build something meaningful together,” Albon said. “Continuing that into 2026 feels like a natural next step.”

Also Read: Your CX Partner Is a Revenue Engine. Treat It Like One.

Eric Johnson, chief executive of SurveyMonkey, said the first season validated the company’s core proposition in an unusually public arena. “We gave fans a voice and turned their feedback into insights that shaped content and engagement throughout the season,” he said, adding that Albon’s genuine rapport with supporters was central to the campaign’s success.

The partnership is managed through FanCapital, a sports marketing firm that brokers sponsorships for athletes and leagues. SurveyMonkey sits alongside Monsoon Valley, Beats by Dre, Domo, and Bell Helmets in Albon’s personal sponsorship portfolio.

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KERV.ai, the leader in video analysis, performance, and monetization announced a strategic partnership with Canela Media, a leading technology and innovation-driven multicultural media company, to bring additional interactive advertising capabilities to Canela Media’s ecosystem.

This collaboration marks KERV.ai’s first partnership with a Spanish-language media company, further expanding its global footprint across a growing roster of premium publishers, OEMs, and platforms. As Canela Media continues to scale its advertising offerings, the company is focused on introducing innovative ad solutions that create more engaging experiences for both audiences and advertisers alike.

Through this partnership, Canela Media will integrate KERV.ai’s interactive video and shoppable creative technology across its ecosystem, enabling more immersive, commerce-driven ad experiences that unlock new opportunities for audience engagement, campaign performance, and monetization.

Also Read: E-commerce Doesn’t Have a Data Problem. It Has a Speed One.

“We’re excited to partner with Canela Media as our first Spanish-language media company,” said Marika Roque, Chief Strategy Officer at KERV.ai. “As Hispanic audiences continue to lead the nation in streaming adoption — with streaming accounting for 55.8% of total TV time versus 46% for the general population, according to Nielsen — this partnership creates new opportunities for brands to engage viewers through more relevant, interactive and shoppable ad experiences.”

“This partnership reflects our continued focus on innovation and creating engaging experiences for our audiences,” said Chechu Lasheras, Canela Media’s Chief Strategy Officer. “By integrating KERV.ai’s technology into our ecosystem, we’re able to introduce additional interactive capabilities that feel seamless for viewers while creating new opportunities for advertisers to connect with consumers.”

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Quiq, the enterprise agentic AI platform used by more than 150 global brands, has launched Voice AI and advanced its platform to support organizations moving from isolated AI experiments to full-scale deployments that must operate reliably across every customer touchpoint. The company has also introduced a new brand identity it says reflects this next phase of customer experience infrastructure.

From Pilots to Production

The challenge facing customer experience teams has shifted. A year ago, the question was whether AI could handle customer interactions at all. Today, the question is whether it can do so consistently, transparently, and at enterprise scale — across channels, brands, languages, and compliance requirements simultaneously.

Most customer experience systems still fall short of that bar. Context is lost as customers move between chat, SMS, and voice. AI decision-making is difficult to audit or explain. Human agents stepping in to handle escalations frequently lack the interaction history needed to resolve issues without asking customers to repeat themselves.

Quiq’s platform addresses all of these problems within a single coordinated system. Voice, messaging, and human agents operate together, sharing context throughout each interaction. AI and human workflows follow the same configurable guardrails, ensuring that every touchpoint — regardless of channel — remains consistent with brand standards, regulatory requirements, and operational oversight expectations.

Also Read: E-commerce Doesn’t Have a Data Problem. It Has a Speed One.

Voice AI: Completing the Channel Picture

The launch of Voice AI extends Quiq’s platform into real-time phone conversations, completing a channel coverage that previously encompassed text-based interactions only. Customers can now move between voice and messaging without losing conversational context. When escalation to a human agent is required, the complete interaction history transfers with the call — eliminating the most common source of customer frustration in enterprise support environments.

Every voice interaction operates under the same governance framework as Quiq’s digital channels, with identical configurable guardrails, transparency mechanisms, and brand alignment controls.

The practical scope of what the platform can manage is considerable. In one current deployment, a global retail organization runs a single AI agent supporting four brands, seven countries, and four communication channels simultaneously — adapting in real time to each brand’s voice, each market’s language, and each customer’s individual history.

The Rebrand

Alongside the platform expansion, Quiq is introducing a new brand identity. The company is explicit that this is not a cosmetic refresh. The rebrand is intended to articulate what has become the platform’s defining proposition: a continuous, connected customer experience supported by transparent AI decisioning and architecture built to apply a company’s specific workflows, standards, and brand voice at every point of interaction.

“Customers expect interactions to feel simple, but delivering that in real-world operations is incredibly complex,” said Jen Grant, Chief Marketing Officer at Quiq. “The real challenge is getting AI to work through the entire customer experience in a way that is reliable, understandable, and under control — which is where the market is heading.”

Also Read: Your CX Partner Is a Revenue Engine. Treat It Like One.

The Underlying Argument

The most effective AI platforms, in Quiq’s framing, do not eliminate enterprise complexity. They absorb it — translating workflows, business rules, and brand standards into systems that are simultaneously highly customizable and consistently executable. The complexity lives in the platform. The simplicity is what the customer experiences.

Quiq says it will continue investing in deeper visibility into AI performance, improved coordination between AI and human agents, and more reliable execution across full customer journeys. As enterprise AI moves from demonstration to dependability, the platform is positioning itself as infrastructure for organizations that can no longer afford the gap between the two.

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A category manager pulls a report and sees that a hero SKU is missing an ingredient keyword that nobody caught, causing the listing that ranked No. 3 to drop to No. 8. Meanwhile, a competitor who adjusted their bids overnight took the top sponsored placement before anyone could react. 

The e-commerce advantage used to belong to whoever had the best data, but today, brands have more data than they can act on, and that edge has now shifted to execution speed. Retail algorithms are getting more sophisticated, retail media costs are rising, and competitor SKU counts keep increasing. Human teams operating on weekly review cycles can’t keep up, and no amount of improved dashboards or additional insights can help.

What these brands need is to adopt an agentic retail approach that moves them from analysis to action, with AI agents that work alongside human teams to execute at the speed that retail demands.

Also Read: Contextual Advertising: What It Is and Why It Matters

E-Commerce Doesn’t Have an Insight Problem. It Has an Execution Problem

CPG brands have more than enough data visibility, but not nearly enough time to act on it. In a recent CommerceIQ survey, 46% of CPG brands said their data isn’t actionable, and 42% said decisions take too long. Meanwhile, the tools brands have been relying on for the last decade aren’t built for the pace at which retail now operates. Dashboards show performance, while weekly reviews help teams plan what’s next. Neither was designed for immediate action, which is necessary to stay competitive in modern e-commerce.

Outsourcing also won’t help brands keep pace, since traditional media agencies can only prepare so many optimizations a day. Even with the additional help from agencies, there’s still a lag between finding a problem and fixing it. By the time a listing is updated, a competitor might have already swooped in. And according to the same survey, more than half of brands said agency costs are too high relative to results.

When a brand loses the Buy Box, a media campaign is outbid, or a stockout goes unnoticed, it might seem like a small issue. Multiply those missed optimizations across thousands of SKUs and a handful of marketplaces, and these seemingly minor problems add up to real revenue that’s regularly moving to competitors.

But how are these competitors moving so quickly? They’re no longer manually digging through their data to diagnose issues, only to wait for human teams to resolve them. They’re using AI agents to act in real time.

Agentic Retail Changes What Execution Looks Like

Agentic retail refers to the use of AI agents to analyze, decide, and execute across thousands of SKUs at once. With agentic retail, instead of teams reacting to their dashboards, they direct agents to act on what’s happening in real time.

These AI agents work across content, pricing, media, and availability 24/7 within the brand-defined guardrails. This looks like: 

• A content agent identifies and resolves PDP compliance and optimization gaps for SEO, AEO, and search visibility across every marketplace.
• A sales agent monitors real-time sales performance and recommends actions to close sales gaps before they impact quarterly results.
• A shelf agent monitors content, availability, assortment, and reviews to identify opportunities for optimization.
• A media agent optimizes retail media performance by leveraging dozens of signals at a scale that no manual process can match.

Each agent works continuously, across the full catalog, not just the top-performing SKUs.

This doesn’t take internal teams or agencies out of the equation; it just means brands can remove them from repetitive tasks and use their time more effectively on work that requires strategy and human judgment. 

Also Read: The CIO Who Says Governance Can Actually Speed Up AI

Agentic Retail Execution Is the New Competitive Advantage

The brands still pulling reports from their dashboards and increasing their agency retainers are solving a problem from the last decade. The ones investing in agentic retail execution are solving the one that will define this one.

It’s during the time between insight and execution that e-commerce performance is won or lost. The speed required to compete has outpaced what any manual process or agency can deliver. If brands can’t execute at the speed marketplaces operate, then their competitors will, taking the sale, the ranking, and the customer with them.

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Typeform, the AI engagement platform used by more than 150,000 businesses, has launched Growth Flow — a customer lifecycle solution that converts every form submission into the starting point of an automated workflow, connecting lead capture, data enrichment, nurturing, and conversion without requiring a separate tool for each step.

The launch targets a structural inefficiency familiar to most growing businesses: the gap between the moment a customer signals interest and the moment a business responds. That gap, typically the product of fragmented tools and manual handoffs, is where leads go cold and revenue opportunities quietly disappear.

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What Growth Flow Does

Growth Flow is built on a straightforward premise. A form submission is not the end of a customer interaction — it is the beginning of one. The platform uses AI to interpret each response in context and automatically trigger the appropriate next action, without delay or data loss between systems.

In practice, that means a prospect can book a meeting, sign an agreement, or complete a payment directly within the form, at the moment of peak intent, without being routed to a separate platform. Sales teams receive instant Slack alerts. Meetings are booked via Google Calendar. Multi-step nurture campaigns launch automatically across email, SMS, and integrated tools, including Klaviyo, from a single submission.

Every response also generates a dynamic customer profile, automatically enriched with third-party data on company size, industry, job title, and demographic signals. The enrichment layer operates within a security-first architecture aligned to GDPR and CCPA requirements, reaching match rates of up to 92 percent for business-to-business contacts and 71 percent for business-to-consumer. Teams gain immediate segmentation and routing context without manual research.

Typeform says its conversational form design already helps businesses collect up to 3.5 times more data than conventional form tools. Growth Flow extends that data advantage into automated action, surfacing real-time conversion signals and audience patterns that allow teams to adapt workflows as customer behavior evolves.

Also Read: Three Myths That Are Keeping Brands Away From AI

The Broader Shift

“For decades, forms have been treated as the end of a conversation — a place where customer intent gets captured and then handed off, disconnected from everything that happens next,” said Aleks Bass, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Typeform. “What used to take ten tools and a lot of manual effort now takes one platform and a single prompt. Typeform is no longer just the form, but the engine that turns responses into revenue.”

The launch reflects a broader consolidation trend in marketing technology, as businesses under resource pressure look to reduce the number of point solutions required to manage the customer journey. Growth Flow’s pitch is that the form — historically a data collection endpoint — can serve as the operational hub for the entire early customer lifecycle, provided the automation and enrichment layers behind it are sufficiently capable.

For small and growing teams running lead generation, sales capture, or customer onboarding, the commercial argument is direct: fewer tools, less manual coordination, and a shorter path from customer intent to customer action.

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Nectar has launched a new partnership with Merlin Entertainments, giving the loyalty scheme’s members a way to redeem points at more than 20 attractions across the United Kingdom — including Alton Towers Resort, Thorpe Park, LEGOLAND Windsor Resort, Chessington World of Adventures, the London Eye, SEA LIFE aquariums, Warwick Castle, and Cadbury World.

The partnership, live from Wednesday, is available through the Nectar app and includes a points-doubling offer: members who swap £5 worth of Nectar points receive £10 off Merlin ticket prices — effectively doubling the redemption value for those who choose to use it.

How to Redeem

The redemption process has been designed to minimize friction. Members open the Nectar app, select the Merlin partner offer, book through the dedicated Merlin-Nectar booking page, choose how many points to apply at checkout, and receive tickets by email. No separate account registration or third-party redirect is required.

“Making it easy for customers to spend their points is really important,” said Amir Rasekh, Managing Director of Nectar360. “By stripping out unnecessary steps, we’ve created a faster, more intuitive redemption experience — one that’s much better for our Nectar members.”

Also Read: Your CX Partner Is a Revenue Engine. Treat It Like One.

The Commercial Logic

For Nectar, the partnership extends the utility of its loyalty currency beyond grocery spending — historically the scheme’s primary redemption context — into leisure and family experiences. For Merlin, it opens access to Nectar’s membership base as a new acquisition and demand-generation channel at a time when the company is investing in new attraction launches.

“We know our Nectar members want great value and real rewards,” said Mark Given, Sainsbury’s Chief Technology, Marketing and Data Officer. “It’s all about giving families fun days out for less and making every point count towards something special.”

Stan Swinton, Merlin’s Chief Growth Officer, pointed to the launch timing as particularly relevant, given that new attractions have recently opened at several sites. “With Bluey the Ride: Here Come the Grannies at Alton Towers and World of PAW Patrol at Chessington World of Adventures, now is an ideal time for Nectar customers to enjoy the benefits of Merlin attractions,” he said. The full list of participating Merlin attractions is available through the Nectar app.

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