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Last decade, companies like Segment rewrote the book on how organizations used APIs to merge data from disparate apps to improve marketing strategies. Today, a startup called Hightouch<\/a> \u2014 co-founded by a former engineering manager at Segment \u2014 is announcing $80 million in funding for the next chapter: a platform that lets sales, marketing, and customer service teams synchronize data warehouses and other locations, along with AI agents to do that work and build those experiences for them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sapphire Ventures is leading this Series C round, with NVC, Amplify Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator also participating. The funding, notably, catapults Hightouch to a $1.2 billion post-money valuation. For some context on that valuation, it roughly doubles the company\u2019s valuation from its last round in 2023<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The funding will be used to continue developing Hightouch\u2019s technology, as well as for business development and hiring.<\/p>\n Tejas Manohar \u2014 the co-CEO of Hightouch, who co-founded the company with Kashish Gupta (co-CEO) and Josh Curl (CTO) \u2014 said that at Segment, where he and Curl were also colleagues, there was work to be done beyond building a way to use APIs to improve integrations. That was a key evolution, but it was one that took a page from how developers worked, and thus could be too technical to execute in practice due to the number of data sources an organization might use.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAsking customers to get data into Segment was an onerous task,\u201d Manohar recalled, not least because data from warehouses, where a lot of data ended up, was primarily used for analytics \u2014 not marketing \u2014 purposes.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2019, as Segment scaled (eventually to the point of getting acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion<\/a>), Manohar and Curl teamed up with Curl\u2019s friend Gupta, a machine learning specialist, to strike out on their own to build Hightouch.<\/p>\n Hightouch has focused on developing tools in two main areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first is its core customer data platform (CDP) product. Designed both for non-technical users as well as data scientists, Hightouch\u2019s CDP was a bit of a breakthrough when it launched in 2020 because of how it shifted away from looking at data in apps and focused on using machine learning and other tooling to make it easier to use data from data warehouses in marketing, sales, and customer service work.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey realised that cloud data warehouses are<\/em> the new customer data platforms,\u201d Rajeev Dham, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, said in an interview. (He is joining the board with this round.)<\/p>\n Uses include building personalization campaigns, loyalty programs, syncing data from data warehouses to a wide range of tools (more than 250, the company says, including all the big CRM and marketing platforms), and more. As we\u2019ve described previously<\/a>, users can create SQL queries to send data from data warehouses to different apps for specific uses, and there is a graphical interface for non-technical people to create queries.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hightouch\u2019s second product is a newer offering, AI Decisioning, which goes deeper into machine learning and automation to do what the name says: it is an agentic AI product that can be prompted with a particular goal, which then runs multiple experiments and tests to suggest optimal campaigns.\u00a0<\/p>\n AI Decisioning has been around since August 2024<\/a>. But while Hightouch was not looking to raise money before \u2014 it\u2019s \u201ccapital efficient\u201d as investors like to say, with money in the bank \u2014 customer interest in the AI product is what led the company to put together this Series C.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s what motivated us to say, All right, let\u2019s have this conversation, and let\u2019s raise the round,\u201d said Gupta, \u201cbecause now we finally have a good use for capital.\u201d<\/p>\n Manohar admitted take-up of the AI product was helped by it getting rolled out to all of its existing customers \u2014 which include companies like Spotify, PetSmart, Tripadvisor, Grammarly, and more. But such is the juggernaut of AI right now that Hightouch found it was also picking up new business as a result of AI Decisioning.\u00a0<\/p>\n While \u201cdo things faster\u201d has long been one strong use case for adopting AI, as Manohar describes it, motivations are maturing.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCompanies, at the CEO and Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer level, are really interested in like, how do we use AI to give our customers a better experience and increase lifetime value and revenue across our customer base?\u201d he said. The AI Decisioning agents can \u201crun thousands of experiments to figure out the best experience to deliver,\u201d Manohar added.<\/p>\n Hightouch\u2019s previous fundraises include a seed round<\/a> in 2020 from Y Combinator and others; a $40 million<\/a> round led by ICONIQ Growth; and a $38 million round<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n