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Historically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online ad campaigns.<\/p>\n
In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch<\/a> launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands such as Domino\u2019s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design teams or ad agencies.<\/p>\n The offering has been highly successful. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), it tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore GenAI, it was impossible for someone without many, many years of design skills to create consumer-level assets,\u201d said Kashish Gupta, Hightouch\u2019s co-CEO. The company is also led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a former engineering manager at Segment, a customer data platform acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion<\/a> in 2020.<\/p>\n However, Hightouch\u2019s approach goes beyond what standard AI models can do on their own.<\/p>\n Hightouch says that many brands initially attempted to generate ad campaigns using general foundational models \u2014 broad AI systems that power tools like chatbots but lack knowledge of specific brands \u2014 only to find the resulting images and videos failed to meet \u201con-brand\u201d standards.<\/p>\n \u201cFoundation models didn\u2019t know about specific consumer brands, whether it was colors or fonts, tone, or assets,\u201d Gupta says. \u201cThe LLMs would hallucinate products that didn\u2019t exist, and you can\u2019t do advertising and emails on products that don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> To ensure brand consistency, Hightouch connects directly to its customers\u2019 existing creative tools, such as the popular design platform Figma, photo libraries, and content management systems (CMS).<\/p>\n By pulling from these sources, the platform \u201clearns\u201d a company\u2019s specific brand identity. Hightouch\u2019s AI agents then use these photos, designs, and customer insights to help marketers build personalized ad campaigns autonomously, without having to wait on designers or developers.<\/p>\n The goal of Hightouch\u2019s AI is to create images and videos that look like they were made by professional designers, avoiding the \u201cfake\u201d or generic look often associated with AI.<\/p>\n \u201cFor example, Domino\u2019s will never generate a pizza,\u201d Gupta says. \u201cThey\u2019ll always use existing images of pizza, and they\u2019ll place it into an ad where the background might be generated, and other things might be generated around it.\u201d<\/p>\n The company, which now employs approximately 380 people, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025 when it raised an $80 million Series C<\/a> funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.<\/p>\n
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