Hightouch, a leading data and AI platform for marketing and personalization, announced that it has raised an $80 million Series C at a valuation of $1.2 billion. Rajeev Dham at Sapphire Ventures led the funding round, which also included participation from NVC, ICONIQ Growth, Amplify Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator.
The funding will help drive the adoption of the company’s AI Decisioning product, which enables marketers to simply identify a business goal and then lets AI agents deliver the optimal 1:1 marketing experiences that will achieve that goal. And AI Decisioning and Hightouch’s original Composable CDP product enabled the company to more than double revenue in the last year and to add numerous enterprise customers like PetSmart, Spotify, and Accor Hotels.
AI Decisioning is a neutral technology working with all existing enterprise data and marketing platforms. And it can sit on top of any data warehouse or CDP and trigger actions across any marketing or digital platform, including Salesforce, Adobe, Iterable, and Braze.
The funding will be used to hire engineering, product, and go-to-market talent that will support enterprise adoption of the Hightouch Composable CDP as well as accelerate AI Decisioning development and deployment among Fortune 500 enterprises.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’ve talked about 1:1 personalization for years, but it’s not possible with the way marketers work today. Everything is too slow, too manual, and usually results in customers receiving a blizzard of irrelevant communications. Our vision is to use AI to help marketers break free of manual work. Instead of building rigid calendars and static journeys that are inherently impersonal, marketers can simply enter goals like ‘drive repeat purchases and subscriptions’ and let AI agents decide what to do next at a 1:1 level. It’s a reimagining of the job of being a marketer.”
– Tejas Manohar, cofounder and co-CEO at Hightouch
“Hightouch is a key part of our strategy for connecting and building loyalty with our pet parents. We have more than 70 million Treats Rewards members in our loyalty program and use AI Decisioning to personalize marketing communications for each of our members, making their experience more meaningful, while supporting growth for our business.”
– Bradley Breuer, Vice President of Marketing, Loyalty, CRM, and Insights at PetSmart
“Our platform uses a combination of reinforcement learning and other models to decide the best message, channel, and timing for each customer. We automatically run high-scale experiments to learn what marketing message is most relevant to each consumer, and we’re quickly adding support for more channels like in-app experiences, advertising, and offer management. The top use case we’re seeing is driving loyalty and frequency of purchase. It’s harder than ever for brands to be relevant, and we believe agentic marketing is the solution.”
– Kashish Gupta, cofounder and co-CEO at Hightouch
“Open up your phone right now. Do you think the marketing you’re receiving is as good as it could be? With AI Decisioning, which automatically determines the best messages to serve up, Hightouch has shown the bold vision and technical know-how to fix both the marketer and customer experience problem once and for all. It’s a huge idea, and we’re excited to partner with Kashish, Tejas, Josh, and the entire team on it.”
– Rajeev Dham, Partner at Sapphire Ventures
