In the last decade, companies such as Segment revolutionized the way organizations utilized APIs to integrate data from various apps, thereby enhancing their marketing strategies. Now, a startup called Hightouch, co-founded by a former Segment engineering manager, has announced $80 million in funding to pioneer the next phase. This phase involves developing a platform that enables sales, marketing, and customer service teams to synchronize data warehouses and other locations, leveraging AI agents to perform these tasks and create personalized experiences.

The Series C funding round is led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from NVC, Amplify Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator. This investment has significantly increased Hightouch’s valuation to $1.2 billion post-money, roughly doubling its valuation from the previous round in 2023.

The funds raised will be utilized to further develop Hightouch’s technology and support business development and hiring initiatives.

Tejas Manohar, co-CEO of Hightouch, who co-founded the company with Kashish Gupta (co-CEO) and Josh Curl (CTO), noted that during his tenure at Segment, he recognized the need to move beyond using APIs for integration. Although this approach was groundbreaking, it was often too technical for practical execution due to the multitude of data sources organizations use.

Manohar recalled that requesting customers to integrate data into Segment was a challenging task, primarily because data from warehouses was mainly used for analytics rather than marketing purposes.

In 2019, as Segment expanded (ultimately leading to its acquisition by Twilio for $3.2 billion), Manohar and Curl partnered with Curl’s friend Gupta, a machine learning specialist, to establish Hightouch.

Hightouch has focused on developing tools in two primary areas.

The first area is its core customer data platform (CDP) product, designed for both non-technical users and data scientists. When launched in 2020, Hightouch’s CDP was innovative because it shifted the focus from app data to using machine learning and other tools to simplify the use of data warehouse data in marketing, sales, and customer service.

Rajeev Dham, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, stated, “They realized that cloud data warehouses are the new customer data platforms.” Dham is joining the board as part of this funding round.

The uses of Hightouch’s platform include building personalization campaigns, loyalty programs, syncing data from data warehouses to a wide range of tools (over 250, including major CRM and marketing platforms), and more. As previously described previously, 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.

Hightouch’s second product, AI Decisioning, is a newer offering that delves deeper into machine learning and automation. This agentic AI product can be prompted with a specific goal and then runs multiple experiments and tests to suggest optimal campaigns.

AI Decisioning was introduced in August 2024. Although Hightouch was not initially seeking to raise funds, customer interest in the AI product led the company to initiate this Series C round.

Gupta explained, “That’s what motivated us to say, ‘Let’s have this conversation, and let’s raise the round,’ because now we finally have a good use for capital.”

Manohar acknowledged that the rollout of the AI product to all existing customers, including companies like Spotify, PetSmart, Tripadvisor, and Grammarly, contributed to its uptake. However, the current AI trend also led to new business opportunities for Hightouch.

While the primary use case for adopting AI has been to accelerate processes, motivations are evolving. As Manohar described, companies are now interested in using AI to provide better customer experiences, increase lifetime value, and boost revenue across their customer base.

The AI Decisioning agents can “run thousands of experiments to determine the best experience to deliver,” Manohar added.

Hightouch’s previous fundraising rounds include a seed round in 2020 from Y Combinator and others, a $40 million round led by ICONIQ Growth, and a $38 million round in 2023.