Over the past decade, companies like segments have rewrite books on how organizations can use APIs to merge data from different applications to improve marketing strategies. Today, a startup called Hightouch was co-founded by a former engineering manager, which is announcing the next chapter of $80 million in funding: a platform that enables sales, marketing and customer service teams to synchronize data warehouses and other Location, and AI agents are going to do this work and build these experiences for them.

Sapphire Ventures is leading the series, with NVC, Amplify Ventures, Iconiq Growth, Bain Capital Ventures and Y Combinator also involved. This fund, especially in the $1.2 billion after the stock market, popped up Hightouch. For some context of this valuation, it roughly doubled the company's valuation from the previous round in 2023.

Funds will be used to continue to develop Hightouch's technology, as well as business development and recruitment.

Tejas Manohar, co-CEO of Hightouch, co-founded the company with Kashish Gupta (Co-Ceo) and Josh Curl (CTO), said that in the segment, he and Curl are also colleagues and still have work to do. In addition to building methods to improve integration using APIs. This is a key evolution, but it draws a page from the way developers work, so because of the number of data sources that an organization may use, it is too technical to be performed in practice.

“It was a difficult task to ask customers to get data into the segment,” Manohar recalls, especially because the data in the warehouse (a lot of which ended up appearing) was mainly used for analysis (not marketing).

In 2019, as the segment expanded (eventually acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion), Manohar and Curl teamed up with machine learning expert Curl's Friend Gupta to strike on their own to build the Hightouch.

Hightouch focuses on developing tools in two main areas.

First is its core customer data platform (CDP) product. Hightouch's CDP is both designed by non-technical users and data scientists and when launched in 2020 it is a breakthrough as it sees data from applications and focuses on using machine learning and other tools to make it that data It is easier to use data from data warehouses in marketing, sales and customer service efforts.

"They realize that cloud data warehouse yes New customer data platform,” Rajeev Dham, partner at Sapphire Ventures, said in an interview. (He joined the board with this round.)

Uses include building personalized campaigns, loyalty programs, syncing data warehouses from data warehouses to a wide range of tools (more than 250 tools, including all large CRMs and marketing platforms), and more. As mentioned earlier, users can create SQL queries to send data warehouses from data warehouses to different applications for specific purposes, and there is a graphical interface for non-technical personnel to create queries.

Hightouch's second product is a newer product, AI decision making, which goes deeper into machine learning and automation to do what the name says: This is a proxy AI product that can be prompted by a specific goal, and then Run multiple experiments and tests to suggest you. Best sports.

Since August 2024, AI decisions have been around. But while Hightouch doesn't want to raise funds, it's "capital efficiency" because investors like to say and make money in banks - customer interest in AI products has prompted the company to invest in the series together.

"That's what prompts us to say, let's have this conversation and let's improve the season because now we're finally making good use of capital."

Manohar acknowledges that the absorption of AI products is helped by launching to all existing customers, including Spotify, Petsmart, TripAdvisor, Grammarly and others. But this is the institutional academy of AI, because Hightouch found that it also acquired new business due to AI's decision-making.

As Manohar describes, while "faster things" have long been a powerful use case for adopting AI, the motivation is ripe.

“Companies at the CEO and Chief Digital Officer and Chief Marketing Officer level are very interested, for example, how do we use AI to provide a better experience for customers and increase the lifetime value and revenue of our customer base?” he said. Manohar added that AI decision agents can “do thousands of experiments to find out the best experience”.

Hightouch’s previous fundraising activities include the 2020 Y Combinator and others’ seed round; the $40 million round led by ICONIQ growth; and a $38 million round in 2023.