Market Data 
- Hightouch raised an $80 million Series C round to become a newly minted unicorn.
- The startup uses companies’ existing data and AI to enhance marketing and sales.
- Hightouch competes with Salesforce and Twilio in the crowded customer data platform space.
Hightouch, a data activation platform for sales and marketing teams, has raised $80 million in Series C funding. Sapphire Ventures led the round, which values Hightouch at $1.2 billion. Iconiq Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, Amplify Ventures, and NVC also participated in the financing.
The San Francisco-based company makes a “composable” customer data platform and AI-powered marketing tools. The customer data platform uses existing company data to help marketers run tailored campaigns, enhance sales leads, and support customer service teams. It operates on top of a company’s existing data infrastructure and integrates with over 250 tools, including Databricks.
“CDP [customer data platform] is all about putting all of that data in the hands of marketing teams so they can understand their customers better and execute on their marketing ideas,” Tejas Manohar, cofounder and co-CEO, said.
In the summer of 2024, the company rolled out its AI decision-making product, an extension of the original platform. This product uses AI agents to help marketers automate and personalize communication with customers. Companies can set business goals, like increasing repeat purchases, and Hightouch’s AI decision-making product will determine the best messaging and timing to send outreach.
“Relevance is becoming super important right now,” cofounder and co-CEO Kashish Gupta told Business Insider. “If you think about how many emails and text messages you get, it’s like a hundred a day. So each CMO is thinking, ‘How can I send only the most relevant message instead of spamming my customers?'”
Before starting Hightouch, Manohar worked at Segment, a customer data platform company acquired by Twilio in 2019. There, Manohar managed the platform team, which allowed customers and developers to build on top of Segment, according to his LinkedIn.
Manohar and Josh Curl, Hightouch cofounder and CTO, met while working at Segment. Curl introduced Manohar to Kashish Gupta, who lived with Curl in a San Francisco hacker house. Before Hightouch, Gupta completed his master’s in machine learning at the University of Pennsylvania. The three started working on Hightouch in 2020, Manohar said.
Some of Hightouch’s customers include PetSmart, Spotify, and Grammarly, the company said. PetSmart uses Hightouch to send personalized communication to members of its loyalty program, Treats Rewards. Hightouch powers a range of communication used by PetSmart, from emails to messages on printed receipts, Bradley Breuer, a vice president of marketing at PetSmart, said. The AI decision-making product also helps PetSmart’s marketing team determine the content, timing, sequence, and priority of its messaging to customers.
Breuer says that the biggest advantage of using Hightough at PetSmart is its ability to execute campaigns autonomously and at scale. For example, the company uses Hightouch to promote its grooming service to customers who shop for dog food and toys. “What used to be human decisions, business rules, the marketing calendar—we now use AI decisioning to make the right choices for our 70 million members,” he told Business Insider.
The customer data platform space is “incredibly and intensely competitive,” Rajeev Dham, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, said. Hightouch competes with legacy marketing cloud providers like Salesforce and Twilio, and newer platforms. Braze, a Sapphire portfolio company that went public in 2021, also helps corporations with customer engagement.
Manohar met Dham, who is joining Hightouch’s board, while he was working at Segment, another Sapphire portfolio company. “The holy grail of marketing is, how do you target the right customer at the right time?” Dham said. “All this data is flowing through Hightouch.”
