Cerebra, which provides analytics to marketers and merchandisers, nabs $15M

Early in the pandemic, as many enterprises looked to digitally transform their operations, marketing and merchandising departments turned to AI to automate the increasing workloads. According to Salesforce, marketers' use of AI soared between 2018 and 2020, jumping from 29% in 2018 to 84% in 2020. A separate survey from ManageEngine -- the IT division of Zoho -- found that analytics for marketing, driven by automation and AI, experienced a 44% adoption surge in over the past two years. Retail and consumer products executives, responding to a recent IBM survey, said that they believe that intelligent automation capabilities could help increase annual revenue growth by up to 10%. Adopters in marketing cite benefits like accelerating revenue as well as getting actionable insights from marketing data.