Final decade, firms like Phase rewrote the ebook on how organizations used APIs to merge knowledge from disparate apps to enhance advertising methods. At present, a startup referred to as Hightouch — co-founded by a former engineering supervisor at Phase — is asserting $80 million in funding for the subsequent chapter: a platform that lets gross sales, advertising, and customer support groups synchronize knowledge warehouses and different places, together with AI brokers to do this work and construct these experiences for them.
Sapphire Ventures is main this Sequence C spherical, with NVC, Amplify Ventures, ICONIQ Progress, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator additionally collaborating. 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 will probably be used to proceed creating Hightouch’s know-how, 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) — stated that at Phase, the place he and Curl had been additionally colleagues, there was work to be executed past constructing a means to make use of APIs to enhance integrations. That was a key evolution, however it was one which took a web page from how builders labored, and thus could possibly be too technical to execute in observe because of the variety of knowledge sources a company would possibly use.
“Asking prospects to get knowledge into Phase was an onerous process,” Manohar recalled, not least as a result of knowledge from warehouses, the place quite a lot of knowledge ended up, was primarily used for analytics — not advertising — functions.
In 2019, as Phase scaled (finally 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 targeted on creating 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 knowledge in apps and targeted 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, stated in an interview. (He’s becoming a member of the board with this spherical.)
Makes use of embody 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 beforehand, customers can create SQL queries to ship knowledge from knowledge warehouses to completely 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 moderen providing, AI Decisioning, which works 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 objective, 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 seeking to increase cash earlier than — it’s “capital environment friendly” as buyers prefer to say, with cash within the financial institution — buyer curiosity within the AI product is what led the corporate to place collectively this Sequence C.
“That’s what motivated us to say, All proper, let’s have this dialog, and let’s increase the spherical,” stated 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 embody firms 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 because of AI Decisioning.
Whereas “do issues sooner” 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 and marketing Officer degree, are actually desirous about like, how will we use AI to present our prospects a greater expertise and enhance lifetime worth and income throughout our buyer base?” he stated. The AI Decisioning brokers can “run hundreds of experiments to determine the perfect expertise to ship,” Manohar added.
Hightouch’s earlier fundraises embody a seed spherical in 2020 from Y Combinator and others; a $40 million spherical led by ICONIQ Progress; and a $38 million spherical in 2023.