A few years back, Segment redefined the way organisations used APIs to combine data from disparate apps to enhance marketing strategies. Now, Hightouch, a startup co-founded by a former engineering manager at Segment, is unlocking the full power of data warehouses for real-time customer engagement.
$80M to drive AI-powered data activation
San Francisco-based Hightouch just raised $80 million in Series C round led by Sapphire Ventures, an investor known for backing tech giants like Spotify, LinkedIn, and Slack. Other key investors include NVC, Amplify Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, and Bain Capital Ventures. With this, the total funding raised by the company accounts for $172 million and its valuation is around $1.2 billion, making it a unicorn.
This latest investment will fuel product innovation, expand AI capabilities, and grow Hightouch’s enterprise presence, reinforcing its position as a leader in the rapidly evolving Composable CDP and AI Decisioning markets.
Built by data experts
Hightouch was founded by Kashish Gupta, Tejas Manohar, and Josh Curl, all of whom bring deep expertise in customer data platforms, machine learning, and enterprise software:
- Kashish Gupta (Co-Founder & Co-CEO): A Y Combinator alum with experience in startups and go-to-market strategy, Kashish holds an MSE in Robotics and a BS in Economics from Wharton.
- Tejas Manohar (Co-Founder & Co-CEO): Former engineering lead at Segment, Tejas saw the limitations of legacy CDPs firsthand and helped develop Hightouch’s warehouse-first approach.
- Josh Curl (Co-Founder & CTO): An early engineer at Segment, Josh co-built the Personas product, which laid the foundation for modern CDPs. His expertise in reinforcement learning and scalable architectures is shaping Hightouch’s AI-driven solutions.
Reinvents customer data platforms
Traditional Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are often costly, rigid, and inefficient, failing to fully leverage the accurate, real-time data stored in cloud data warehouses. Hightouch was founded on the belief that businesses should activate customer data directly from their warehouses, eliminating duplication, reducing lag, and ensuring better decision-making.
This approach, known as Composable CDP, is reshaping the marketing and advertising industries by allowing companies to:
- Sync customer data in real-time across marketing, sales, and support tools
- Reduce operational costs by removing the need for duplicative CDP storage
- Ensure compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA
AI decisioning: The next frontier in personalisation
By leveraging AI agents, Hightouch hopes to free marketers from manual work and makes personalization at scale possible. The platform can analyse massive data sets to determine optimal message frequency, timing, and content, automatically tailor marketing campaigns at an individual level, and scale personalised engagement across email, ads, web, and app experiences.
Competition
In terms of ad tech competition, Hightouch faces competitors like LiveRamp. For their CDP business, Hightouch competes with companies like Adobe and Salesforce. Other notable CDP vendors in the market include Imparticle, Segment, Tilium, Treasure Data, and Action IQ. The market is still emerging with the main player being OfferFit and potential competition from companies like MovableInk and Aampe.
“We’ve talked about 1:1 personalisation for years, but it’s not possible with the way marketers work today. Everything is too slow, too manual, and usually results in customers receiving a blizzard of irrelevant communications,” said Tejas Manohar, Co-founder and Co-CEO at Hightouch. “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.”
“The top use case we’re seeing is driving loyalty and frequency. It’s harder than ever to drive relevance and we believe agentic AI is a solution,” said Kashish Gupta, Co-founder and Co-CEO at Hightouch.
“Our platform combines multiple ML models to decide the best message, channel, and timing for each customer. We automatically run high scale experiments to learn what works best for each consumer, and we’re quickly adding support for more channels like offers, promotions, web, and app experiences,” added Josh Curl, Co-founder and CTO.
“Open up your phone right now. Do you think the marketing you’re receiving is as good as it could be?” said Sapphire Ventures Partner Rajeev Dham, who will join the Hightouch board. “With AI Decisioning, which automatically determines the best messages to serve up, Hightouch has shown the bold vision and technical know-how to fix both the marketer and customer experience problem once and for all. It’s a huge idea, and we’re excited to partner with Kashish, Tejas, and the entire team on it.”
The post Unicorn alert: Hightouch snaps $80M at $1.2B valuation to bring AI decisioning to marketers appeared first on Tech Funding News.