- Hightouch has raised a round C of $ 80 million to become a newly struck unicorn.
- The startup uses the data and the existing AI of companies to improve marketing and sales.
- Hightouch competes with Salesforce and Twilio in the crowded customer data platform space.
Hightouch, an activation of data activation platform for sales and marketing teams, raised $ 80 million in C. Sapphire Ventures finance led the Tour, which values Hightouch at $ 1.2 billion. Iconiq Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, Amplify Ventures and NVC also participated in funding.
The company based in San Francisco manufactures a “composable” customer data platform and marketing tools powered by AI. The customer data platform uses existing company data to help marketing specialists to carry out tailor-made campaigns, improve sales prospects and support customer service teams. It operates above the existing data infrastructure of a company and integrates with more than 250 tools, including data data.
“CDP (Customer Data Platform) is to put all this data in the hands of marketing teams so that they can better understand their customers and execute their marketing ideas,” said Tejas Manohar, co-founder and CO-PDG.
In the summer of 2024, the company deployed its IA decision-making product, an extension of the original platform. This product uses AI agents to help marketing specialists to automate and personalize communication with customers. Companies can set commercial objectives, such as the increase in repeated purchases, and the Decision -making product of Hightouch will determine the best messaging and calendar to send awareness.
“Relevance is becoming super important at the moment,” the co-founder and CO-PDG Kashish Gupta told Business Insider. “If you think about the number of emails and sms you get, it’s like a hundred a day. So each CMO thinks:” How can I only send the most relevant message instead of spaming my customers ? “”
Before starting Hightouch, Manohar worked at Segment, a customer data platform company acquired by Twilio in 2019. There, Manohar managed the platform team, which allowed customers and developers to build Above the segment, according to his LinkedIn.
Manohar and Josh Curl, co -founder of Hightouch and CTO, met while working in the segment. Curl presented Manohar at Kashish Gupta, who lived with Curl in a pirate house in San Francisco. Before Hightouch, Gupta finished its mastery in automatic learning at the University of Pennsylvania. The three started working on Hightouch in 2020, said Manohar.
Some Hightouch customers include Petsmart, Spotify and Grammarly, said the company. Petsmart uses Hightouch to send personalized communication to members of its loyalty program, treats the awards. Hightouch feeds a communication range used by Petsmart, from emails to messages on printed receipts, said Bradley Breuer, marketing vice-president at Petsmart. The AI decision -making product also helps the Petsmart marketing team to determine the content, calendar, sequence and priority of its messages to customers.
Breuer says that the greatest advantage of using Highttough at Petsmart is its ability to carry out campaigns independently and on a large scale. For example, the company uses Hightouch to promote its grooming service to customers who buy food for dogs and toys. “What was formerly human decisions, commercial rules, marketing calendar-we are now using AI decision to make the right choices for our 70 million members,” he told Business Insider.
The space of the customer data platform is “incredibly and intensely competitive,” said Rajeev Dham, partner of Sapphire Ventures. Hightouch competes with Cloud Marketing suppliers inherited like Salesforce and Twilio, and new platforms. Braze, a sapphire portfolio company which became public in 2021, also helps businesses for customer engagement.
Manohar met Dham, who joined the board of directors of Hightouch, while working at Segment, another Sapphire portfolio company. “The Saint Grail of Marketing is, how do you target the right customer at the right time?” Said Dham. “All this data is going through Hightouch.”
businessinsider
