Zeta Global, the data-driven marketing technology innovator whose SaaS-based marketing cloud helps leading brands acquire, retain and grow customer relationships, announced today that it has acquired Boomtrain, a machine learning driven marketing technology platform that uses artificial intelligence to drive personalised messaging across all digital touchpoints.

Boomtrain developed the first marketing technology platform with machine intelligence at its core, enabling brands to better understand and communicate with their customers. Launched in March 2014, the Boomtrain platform has gained significant traction, attracting more than 120 clients including leading media companies such as CBS and Dow Jones. Boomtrain's technology will become the personalisation engine within ZetaHub, the Gartner Magic Quadrant-rated digital marketing hub. Following the acquisition, Zeta will hold one of the largest machine learning patent portfolios in marketing technology.

"Zeta Global, a company that specializes in marketing automation software, now has $140 million in new funding, including $25 million in debt financing, with which it plans to fund expansion.

The company, co-founded by former Apple CEO and Pepsi-Cola president John Sculley and entrepreneur David Steinberg, was partially built on the acquisition of nine companies, and it's "highly probable we'll buy a tenth," Steinberg told Fortune.

The company boasts a proprietary database of 350 million active people and focuses on processing that data very fast—most transactions have a response time of under three milliseconds. The company, like many, relies heavily on machine learning, a set of technologies that allows software to detect patterns in masses of data and use those patterns to fuel actions."