Traditionally, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online advertising campaigns.
In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands like Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design teams or advertising agencies.
This proposal was a great success. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has increased annual recurring revenue (ARR) by $70 million, bringing the startup’s total ARR to $100 million, he told TechCrunch.
“Before GenAI, it was impossible for anyone without years of design skills to create consumer-grade assets,” said Kashsh Gupta, co-CEO of Hightouch. The company is also led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a former engineering manager at Segment, a customer data platform acquired by Twilio in 2020 for $3.2 billion.
However, Hightouch’s approach goes beyond what standard AI models can do on their own.
Many brands initially tried to generate advertising campaigns using common underlying models (broad AI systems that power tools such as chatbots, but lack specific brand knowledge), but found that the resulting images and videos did not meet “brand-specific” standards, according to Hytouch.
“The foundation model didn’t know about the specific consumer brand: colors, fonts, tones, assets, etc.,” says Gupta. “LLMs will hallucinate products that don’t exist, and they can’t advertise or send emails about products that don’t exist.”
tech crunch event
San Francisco, California
|
October 13-15, 2026
To ensure brand consistency, Hightouch connects directly to customers’ existing creative tools, including the popular design platform Figma, photo libraries, and content management systems (CMS).
By retrieving information from these sources, the platform “learns” a company’s specific brand identity. Hightouch’s AI agent uses these photos, designs, and customer insights to help marketers autonomously build personalized advertising campaigns without waiting on designers and developers.
Hightouch AI’s goal is to create images and videos that look like they were created by a professional designer, avoiding the “fake” or generic look often associated with AI.
“Domino’s Pizza, for example, never produces pizza,” says Gupta. “They would always use an existing image of a pizza and place it within an ad where a background would be generated, and other things could be generated around it.”
The company, which currently has approximately 380 employees, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025 after raising $80 million in a Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.
Pictured above, left to right: Tejas Manohar, Josh Karl, Kashish Gupta.
Source link
