Over the past decade, companies like Segment have rewritten books on how organizations can use APIs to merge data from different apps to improve their marketing strategies. Today, a startup called Hightouch, co-founded by the segment’s former engineering manager, is unveiling the next chapter of $80 million in funding. Along with a platform where sales, marketing and customer service teams can sync data warehouses and other locations, AI agents do their job and build those experiences.
Sapphire Ventures also leads the Series C round with NVC, Amplify Ventures, Iconiq Growth, Bain Capital Ventures and Y Combinator. This funding will, in particular, catapult Haitouche into a post-money valuation of $1.2 billion. In some contexts about that valuation, it almost doubles the company’s valuation since the last round of 2023.
This fund will be used to continue developing Hightouch technology and for business development and employment.
Tejas Manohar – Co-CEO of Hightouch, who co-founded the company with Kashish Gupta (Co-CEO) and Josh Curl (CTO), had work to do in the segment where he and Curl were also colleagues. Other than building ways to improve integrations using APIs. It was a significant evolution, but it was something that got the page from how developers work, and could be too technical to actually run due to the number of data sources your organization uses. .
“It was a hassle to ask customers to put data into segments,” Manohar recalls, especially since data from warehouses where a lot of data was finished was mainly used for analysis rather than marketing. I will.
In 2019, as the segment was scaled (until it was eventually acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion), Manohar and Curl, in collaboration with machine learning specialist Curl’s friend Gupta, will be working on the solo journey to build Hightouch. I attacked with.
Hightouch focuses on tool development in two major areas.
The first is a Core Customer Data Platform (CDP) product. Designed with both Hightouch’s CDP for both non-technical users and data scientists, Hightouch’s CDP, when it was launched in 2020, moved away from looking at app data, and was able to do so in machine learning and other It was a bit of a breakthrough due to the method that focused on using the tool. Easy to use data from data warehouses for marketing, sales and customer service jobs.
“They realized that cloud data warehouses are the new customer data platform,” Rajeev Dham, partner at Sapphire Ventures, said in an interview. (He is on the board of directors this round.)
Applications include building personalization campaigns, loyalty programs, and data synchronization (over 250) from data warehouses. As mentioned before, users can create SQL queries to send data from the data warehouse to various apps for a specific purpose. There is also a graphical interface that allows non-technical people to create queries.
Hightouch’s second product is the decision-making of the new product, AI, and deepens into machine learning and automation to do what the name says. This is an agent AI product that can be encouraged by a specific goal. The best campaign.
AI decision-making has been around since August 2024. However, Hightouch has not tried to raise funds before, but as investors say with money in the bank, it is “capital efficiency.” Together with this series C.
“That was the motivation we said. It’s okay. Let’s have this conversation. Let’s raise the round,” Gupta said.
Manohar has admitted that the AI product coverage has been helped by being deployed to all existing customers, including companies such as Spotify, Petsmart, Tripadvisor, and Grammarly. However, Hightouch has now discovered that AI’s Juggernaut is gaining new business as a result of AI decisions.
As Manohar explains it, “make things faster” has been one of the powerful use cases for adopting AI for a long time, but the motivation is mature.
“Are companies at the CEO, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer level really interested in how they use AI to deliver their customers to a better experience and increase lifetime value and revenue across their customer base? ” he said. AI decision-making agents can “run thousands of experiments to figure out the best experience to deliver,” Manohar added.
Hightouch’s previous fundraising includes seed rounds from the 2020 Y Combinator and others. A $40 million round led by ICONIQ growth. 2023 $38 million round.
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