Final decade, corporations like Section rewrote the ebook on how organizations used APIs to merge knowledge from disparate apps to enhance advertising methods. Immediately, a startup known as Hightouch — co-founded by a former engineering supervisor at Section — is saying $80 million in funding for the subsequent chapter: a platform that lets gross sales, advertising, and customer support groups synchronize knowledge warehouses and different areas, together with AI brokers to try this work and construct these experiences for them.
Sapphire Ventures is main this Collection C spherical, with NVC, Amplify Ventures, ICONIQ Development, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator additionally taking part. The funding, notably, catapults Hightouch to a $1.2 billion post-money valuation. For some context on that valuation, it roughly doubles the corporate’s valuation from its final spherical in 2023.
The funding can be used to proceed growing Hightouch’s expertise, in addition to for enterprise growth and hiring.
Tejas Manohar — the co-CEO of Hightouch, who co-founded the corporate with Kashish Gupta (co-CEO) and Josh Curl (CTO) — mentioned that at Section, the place he and Curl had been additionally colleagues, there was work to be finished past constructing a approach to make use of APIs to enhance integrations. That was a key evolution, but it surely was one which took a web page from how builders labored, and thus might be too technical to execute in follow as a result of variety of knowledge sources a company may use.
“Asking prospects to get knowledge into Section was an onerous activity,” Manohar recalled, not least as a result of knowledge from warehouses, the place lots of knowledge ended up, was primarily used for analytics — not advertising — functions.
In 2019, as Section scaled (ultimately to the purpose of getting acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion), Manohar and Curl teamed up with Curl’s pal Gupta, a machine studying specialist, to strike out on their very own to construct Hightouch.
Hightouch has centered on growing instruments in two foremost areas.
The primary is its core buyer knowledge platform (CDP) product. Designed each for non-technical customers in addition to knowledge scientists, Hightouch’s CDP was a little bit of a breakthrough when it launched in 2020 due to the way it shifted away from taking a look at knowledge in apps and centered on utilizing machine studying and different tooling to make it simpler to make use of knowledge from knowledge warehouses in advertising, gross sales, and customer support work.
“They realised that cloud knowledge warehouses are the brand new buyer knowledge platforms,” Rajeev Dham, a companion at Sapphire Ventures, mentioned in an interview. (He’s becoming a member of the board with this spherical.)
Makes use of embrace constructing personalization campaigns, loyalty packages, syncing knowledge from knowledge warehouses to a variety of instruments (greater than 250, the corporate says, together with all the massive CRM and advertising platforms), and extra. As we’ve described previously, customers can create SQL queries to ship knowledge from knowledge warehouses to totally different apps for particular makes use of, and there’s a graphical interface for non-technical folks to create queries.
Hightouch’s second product is a more recent providing, AI Decisioning, which matches deeper into machine studying and automation to do what the title says: it’s an agentic AI product that may be prompted with a specific aim, which then runs a number of experiments and assessments to counsel optimum campaigns.
AI Decisioning has been round since August 2024. However whereas Hightouch was not trying to elevate cash earlier than — it’s “capital environment friendly” as traders wish to say, with cash within the financial institution — buyer curiosity within the AI product is what led the corporate to place collectively this Collection C.
“That’s what motivated us to say, All proper, let’s have this dialog, and let’s elevate the spherical,” mentioned Gupta, “as a result of now we lastly have use for capital.”
Manohar admitted take-up of the AI product was helped by it getting rolled out to all of its current prospects — which embrace corporations like Spotify, PetSmart, Tripadvisor, Grammarly, and extra. However such is the juggernaut of AI proper now that Hightouch discovered it was additionally selecting up new enterprise on account of AI Decisioning.
Whereas “do issues quicker” has lengthy been one robust use case for adopting AI, as Manohar describes it, motivations are maturing.
“Firms, on the CEO and Chief Digital Officer and Chief Advertising Officer stage, are actually involved in like, how will we use AI to present our prospects a greater expertise and enhance lifetime worth and income throughout our buyer base?” he mentioned. The AI Decisioning brokers can “run 1000’s of experiments to determine the very best expertise to ship,” Manohar added.
Hightouch’s earlier fundraises embrace a seed round in 2020 from Y Combinator and others; a $40 million spherical led by ICONIQ Development; and a $38 million round in 2023.