Cox Automotive announced today that it will acquire Fullpath, an AI-powered Customer Data Platform and marketing automation company. The deal is expected to close within 30 days.
Driving the news: Fullpath's main strength is solving the fragmented customer data problem by uniting years of disconnected CRM and DMS data into a single usable profile.
The cleaned data can then power AI-driven marketing campaigns, lead follow-ups, and the ability to trace a single customer's journey from the moment they click an ad to the moment they drive off the lot, according to the press release.
“Dealers who are still running manual marketing cycles are already falling behind,” Steve Rowley, president of Cox Automotive, told CDG News via email. “This acquisition is Cox Automotive's statement that AI-driven, always-on retailing is the future — and we're committed to making sure our dealers are positioned to lead it, not catch up to it.”
Why it matters: We hear it often from dealers that every AI tool in a dealer's tech stack is only as smart as the data feeding it.
Fragmented CRM records, duplicate customer profiles, and disconnected DMS history often work together to erode the ROI for dealers investing in those tools. But Fullpath’s products aim to solve that.
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How it works: Fullpath's platform will now connect to Cox's shopper data from Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, and Dealer.com, reaching tens of millions of active car shoppers.
Cox's existing network of 40,000-plus dealer relationships gives Fullpath a distribution scale that no standalone platform could reach independently, according to the release.
"As data is the fuel of a CDP, joining Cox Automotive means our AI-driven platform will deliver more intelligence, more speed, and more value to dealers than ever before," Aharon Horwitz, CEO and co-founder of Fullpath, said in the release.
For Fullpath customers, the same team, products, and service levels will remain in place following the deal’s close, according to the press release.
Looking ahead: If Fullpath’s clean data works at scale across Cox's dealer network as planned, it fundamentally changes how the industry measures marketing ROI. Rowley said more detail about how this feels at an operational level will be shared after the deal.
“For now, we know this, that the automotive retail landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift,” Rowley said. “Agentic AI trained on the broadest and deepest consumer and dealer dataset in the industry will drive the highest level of value to our dealer clients.”
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