In the past decade, as a segment, companies have rewritten the book on how organizations used APIs to merge data from different apps to improve marketing strategies. Today is called a startup Hightouch -Founded by a former Engineering Manager at Segment-Kondigt $ 80 million in financing for the next chapter: a platform with which sales, marketing and customer service teams can synchronize data warehouses and other locations, together with AI agents to do that work And build those experiences for them.
Sapphire Ventures leads this series C round, with NVC, Amplify Ventures, Iconiq Growth, Bain Capital Ventures and Y Combinator that also participate. The financing, in particular, catapults Hightouch to a rating of $ 1.2 billion after the money. For some context about that appreciation, it roughly doubles the appreciation of the company from the last round in 2023.
The financing will be used to continue to develop the technology of Hightouch, as well as for business development and recruitment.
Tejas Manohar-de Co-CEO from Hightouch, who co-designed the company with Kashish Gupta (Co-CEO) and Josh Curl (CTO)-Zeei in the segment, where he and Krul were also colleagues, had to do work there. In addition to building a way to use APIs to improve integrations. That was an important evolution, but it was one that took a page of how developers worked and could therefore be too technical to perform in practice because of the number of data sources that an organization could use.
“Asking customers to get data in segment was a tough task,” Manohar remembered, not least because data from warehouses, where a lot of data ended, were mainly used for analyzes – no marketing – purposes.
In 2019, when the segment was scaled (ultimately to the point to be taken over by Twilio for $ 3.2 billion), Manohar and Curl worked together with Curl’s friend Gupta, a specialist in the field of machine learning, to be in itself steps to build Hightouch.
Hightouch has focused on developing tools in two main areas.
The first is the product of Core Customer Data Platform (CDP). Both designed for both non-technical users and data scientists, the Hightouch CDP was a bit of a breakthrough when it was launched in 2020 because of how the shift from looking at data in apps and aimed at using machine learning and other tooling to the easier to use data from data warehouses in marketing, sales and customer service work.
“They realized that cloud data warehouses Are The new customer data platforms, “said Rajeev Dham, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, in an interview. (He joins the plate with this round.)
Use includes building personalization campaigns, loyalty programs, synchronizing data from data warehouses to a wide range of tools (more than 250, says the company, including all major CRM and marketing platforms), and more. As we have described, users can make SQL querys to send data from data warehouses to different apps for specific use, and there is a graphic interface for non-technical people to make queries.
The second product of Hightouch is a newer offer, AI decision, which goes deeper into machine learning and automation to do what the name says: it is an agent AI product that can be requested with a certain goal, which then several experiments And performs tests to suggest optimum campaigns.
AI decision has been around since then August 2024. But although Hightouch does not want to raise money earlier – it is “capital efficient” as investors like to say, with money in the bank – the importance of the customer in the AI product is that the company has compiled this series C.
“That is what we have motivated to say, okay, let’s have this conversation and let’s raise the round,” said Gupta, “because we are finally doing good use for capital.”
Manohar admitted that the AI product was helped, was helped because it was rolled out for all its existing customers, including companies such as Spotify, Petsmart, Tripadvisor, Grammarly and more. But that is the Juggernaut of AI at the moment that Hightouch discovered that it also picked up new matters as a result of AI decision.
Although “Do Things faster” has long been a strong use case to accept AI, as Manohar describes it, the motivations mature.
“Companies, at the CEO and Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer, are really interested in Like, how do we use AI to give our customers a better experience and to increase lifelong value and turnover in our customer base?” he said. The AI decision agents can “carry out thousands of experiments to find the best experience to deliver,” Manohar added.
The earlier fundraising of Hightouch include a seed round in 2020 of Y Combinator and others; a round of $ 40 million under the leadership of Iconiq growth; And a round of $ 38 million in 2023.
