Last decade, corporations like Segment rewrote the guide on how organizations used APIs to merge information from disparate apps to enhance advertising methods. Today, a startup referred to as Hightouch — co-founded by a former engineering supervisor at Segment — is asserting $80 million in funding for the following chapter: a platform that lets gross sales, advertising, and customer support groups synchronize information warehouses and different areas, together with AI brokers to do this work and construct these experiences for them.
Sapphire Ventures is main this Series C spherical, with NVC, Amplify Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator additionally collaborating. The funding, notably, catapults Hightouch to a $1.2 billion post-money valuation. For some context on that valuation, it roughly doubles the corporate’s valuation from its final spherical in 2023.
The funding might be used to proceed growing Hightouch’s know-how, in addition to for enterprise improvement and hiring.
Tejas Manohar — the co-CEO of Hightouch, who co-founded the corporate with Kashish Gupta (co-CEO) and Josh Curl (CTO) — mentioned that at Segment, the place he and Curl had been additionally colleagues, there was work to be finished past constructing a means to make use of APIs to enhance integrations. That was a key evolution, but it surely was one which took a web page from how builders labored, and thus may very well be too technical to execute in follow as a result of variety of information sources a corporation would possibly use.
“Asking clients to get information into Segment was an onerous process,” Manohar recalled, not least as a result of information from warehouses, the place plenty of information ended up, was primarily used for analytics — not advertising — functions.
In 2019, as Segment scaled (finally to the purpose of getting acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion), Manohar and Curl teamed up with Curl’s pal Gupta, a machine studying specialist, to strike out on their very own to construct Hightouch.
Hightouch has centered on growing instruments in two most important areas.
The first is its core buyer information platform (CDP) product. Designed each for non-technical customers in addition to information scientists, Hightouch’s CDP was a little bit of a breakthrough when it launched in 2020 due to the way it shifted away from taking a look at information in apps and centered on utilizing machine studying and different tooling to make it simpler to make use of information from information warehouses in advertising, gross sales, and customer support work.
“They realised that cloud information warehouses are the brand new buyer information platforms,” Rajeev Dham, a companion at Sapphire Ventures, mentioned in an interview. (He is becoming a member of the board with this spherical.)
Uses embody constructing personalization campaigns, loyalty packages, syncing information from information warehouses to a variety of instruments (greater than 250, the corporate says, together with all the large CRM and advertising platforms), and extra. As we’ve described beforehand, customers can create SQL queries to ship information from information warehouses to totally different apps for particular makes use of, and there’s a graphical interface for non-technical folks to create queries.
Hightouch’s second product is a more recent providing, AI Decisioning, which fits deeper into machine studying and automation to do what the identify says: it’s an agentic AI product that may be prompted with a specific objective, which then runs a number of experiments and checks to recommend optimum campaigns.
AI Decisioning has been round since August 2024. But whereas Hightouch was not seeking to increase cash earlier than — it’s “capital environment friendly” as buyers wish to say, with cash within the financial institution — buyer curiosity within the AI product is what led the corporate to place collectively this Series C.
“That’s what motivated us to say, All proper, let’s have this dialog, and let’s increase the spherical,” mentioned Gupta, “as a result of now we lastly have use for capital.”
Manohar admitted take-up of the AI product was helped by it getting rolled out to all of its present clients — which embody corporations like Spotify, PetSmart, Tripadvisor, Grammarly, and extra. But such is the juggernaut of AI proper now that Hightouch discovered it was additionally choosing up new enterprise on account of AI Decisioning.
While “do issues sooner” has lengthy been one robust use case for adopting AI, as Manohar describes it, motivations are maturing.
“Companies, on the CEO and Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer stage, are actually inquisitive about like, how can we use AI to present our clients a greater expertise and enhance lifetime worth and income throughout our buyer base?” he mentioned. The AI Decisioning brokers can “run hundreds of experiments to determine the most effective expertise to ship,” Manohar added.
Hightouch’s earlier fundraises embody a seed spherical in 2020 from Y Combinator and others; a $40 million spherical led by ICONIQ Growth; and a $38 million spherical in 2023.
