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.
Hightouch’s previous fundraises include a seed round in 2020 from Y Combinator and others; a $40 million round led by ICONIQ Growth; and a $38 million round in 2023.
