Hightouch Secures $80M Funding, Reaches Unicorn Status with AI-Powered Marketing Platform

Hightouch raises $80M on a $1.2B valuation for marketing tools powered by AI | TechCrunch

Last decade, companies like Segment rewrote the book on how organizations used APIs to merge data from disparate apps to improve marketing strategies. Today, a startup called Hightouch -- co-founded by a former engineering manager at Segment -- is announcing $80 million in funding for the next chapter: a platform that lets sales, marketing, and customer service teams synchronize data warehouses and other locations, along with AI agents to do that work and build those experiences for them. Sapphire Ventures is leading this Series C round, with NVC, Amplify Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator also participating. The funding, notably, catapults Hightouch to a $1.2 billion post-money valuation. For some context on that valuation, it roughly doubles the company's valuation from its last round in 2023. The funding will be used to continue developing Hightouch's technology, as well as for business development and hiring. Tejas Manohar -- the co-CEO of Hightouch, who co-founded the company with Kashish Gupta (co-CEO) and Josh Curl (CTO) -- said that at Segment, where he and Curl were also colleagues, there was work to be done beyond building a way to use APIs to improve integrations. That was a key evolution, but it was one that took a page from how developers worked, and thus could be too technical to execute in practice due to the number of data sources an organization might use. "Asking customers to get data into Segment was an onerous task," Manohar recalled, not least because data from warehouses, where a lot of data ended up, was primarily used for analytics -- not marketing -- purposes. In 2019, as Segment scaled (eventually to the point of getting acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion), Manohar and Curl teamed up with Curl's friend Gupta, a machine learning specialist, to strike out on their own to build Hightouch. Hightouch has focused on developing tools in two main areas. The first is its core customer data platform (CDP) product. Designed both for non-technical users as well as data scientists, Hightouch's CDP was a bit of a breakthrough when it launched in 2020 because of how it shifted away from looking at data in apps and focused on using machine learning and other tooling to make it easier to use data from data warehouses in marketing, sales, and customer service work. "They realised that cloud data warehouses are the new customer data platforms," Rajeev Dham, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, said in an interview. (He is joining the board with this round.) Uses include building personalization campaigns, loyalty programs, syncing data from data warehouses to a wide range of tools (more than 250, the company says, including all the big CRM and marketing platforms), and more. As we've described previously, users can create SQL queries to send data from data warehouses to different apps for specific uses, and there is a graphical interface for non-technical people to create queries. Hightouch's second product is a newer offering, AI Decisioning, which goes deeper into machine learning and automation to do what the name says: it is an agentic AI product that can be prompted with a particular goal, which then runs multiple experiments and tests to suggest optimal campaigns. AI Decisioning has been around since August 2024. But while Hightouch was not looking to raise money before -- it's "capital efficient" as investors like to say, with money in the bank -- customer interest in the AI product is what led the company to put together this Series C. "That's what motivated us to say, All right, let's have this conversation, and let's raise the round," said Gupta, "because now we finally have a good use for capital." Manohar admitted take-up of the AI product was helped by it getting rolled out to all of its existing customers -- which include companies like Spotify, PetSmart, Tripadvisor, Grammarly, and more. But such is the juggernaut of AI right now that Hightouch found it was also picking up new business as a result of AI Decisioning. While "do things faster" has long been one strong use case for adopting AI, as Manohar describes it, motivations are maturing. "Companies, at the CEO and Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer level, are really interested in like, how do we use AI to give our customers a better experience and increase lifetime value and revenue across our customer base?" he said. The AI Decisioning agents can "run thousands of experiments to figure out the best experience to deliver," Manohar added.

Marketing analytics startup Hightouch reels in $80M at $1.2B valuation - SiliconANGLE

Marketing analytics startup Hightouch reels in $80M at $1.2B valuation Marketing software startup Hightouch today announced that it has closed a $80 million funding round at a $1.2 billion valuation. Sapphire Ventures led the Series C investment. It was joined by Bain Capital Ventures, which led Hightouch's previous $38 million funding round, Y Combinator and several other institutional backers. The raise follows a year in which the software maker claims to have more than doubled its revenue. Hightouch, officially Carry Technologies Inc., provides a customer data platform that makes it easier to analyze marketing information such as ad performance metrics. Enterprises often host such information in cloud data warehouses. Hightouch's CDP can run directly on a company's data warehouse, which means the information inside doesn't have to be moved to external infrastructure before analysis can begin. Hightouch makes it possible to assemble disparate marketing records into datasets called audiences. A company could, for example, create an audience that includes all the customers who have made at least three purchases in the past year. The company's advertising team can then create personalized offers tailored to the users in that audience. Enterprises can link Hightouch's CDP to their other marketing systems. An online retailer could use data from the platform to personalize query results in its e-commerce website's embedded search engine. Hightouch also makes it possible to customize product catalogs, shopping recommendations and other marketing materials. Last August, the company expanded its product portfolio with a tool called AI Decisioning. Marketers use it by uploading promotional materials, such a collection of product ads, and variations of that content personalized for different audiences. From there, AI Decisioning automatically determines what promotion should be displayed to which user and when. The software doubles as an A/B testing tool. Companies can create multiple versions of the same promotion and display each version to a different audience. According to Hightouch, AI Decisioning collects data about the performance of the different ad versions to identify the one that drives the most sales. "Instead of building rigid calendars and static journeys that are inherently impersonal, marketers can simply enter goals like 'drive repeat purchases and subscriptions' and let AI agents decide what to do next at a 1:1 level," said Hightouch co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Tejas Manohar.

AI Marketing Platform Hightouch Reaches Unicorn Status After $80M Series C

The San Francisco-based startup plans to use the money to push its new platform that is powered by -- what else? -- artificial intelligence. Hightouch's AI Decisioning product allows marketers to synchronize data and then let AI agents decide what messages and/or experiences to send each customer -- personalizing the marketing effort. The company more than doubled its revenue last year while adding large enterprise customers like PetSmart and Weight Watchers. "We've talked about 1:1 personalization for years, but it's not possible with the way marketers work today. ..." said co-founder and co-CEO Tejas Manohar in a release. "Our vision is to use AI to help marketers break free of manual work. Instead of building rigid calendars and static journeys that are inherently impersonal, marketers can simply enter goals like 'drive repeat purchases and subscriptions' and let AI agents decide what to do next at a 1:1 level. It's a reimagining of the job of being a marketer." AI has had a profound effect on many sectors like biotech and cybersecurity, as many startups have added the technology to their platforms. Marketing is no exception, as Hightouch is only the most recent marketing tech startup to get funding.