Hightouch, a platform that helps companies sync customer data across different back-end databases and systems, today announced that it raised $38 million in a funding round that values the startup at $615 million.
Kashish Gupta, Tejas Manohar and Josh Curl co-founded Hightouch in 2020 after living together in a “hacker house” in the Mission District of San Francisco. Manohar and Curl were growing disillusioned with the customer data platform industry, in which they previously worked — mainly because they saw it creating a divide between data and marketing teams.
“We spent tons of effort centralizing data in a data warehouse and integrating it with downstream systems,” Gupta, who serves as Hightouch’s CEO, told TechCrunch via email. “Seeing the value in centering a data architecture on the data warehouse kept us questioning why customer data platforms like Segment didn’t do so as well.”
Gupta describes Hightouch as a “composable” customer data platform — that is, a platform that enables marketers to make use of data directly from a data warehouse via no-code tools. (Recall that a data warehouse is a system for reporting, analytics and data analysis, particularly business analytics.) Hightouch, he added, is designed to accomplish the “last mile” of data analytics — actually using analytics to drive key business outcomes.
“Hightouch is the tool that helps you get business value out of your data analytics,” Gupta said. “The platform provides marketers with direct access to the company’s data, enabling them to activate it to power personalized omnichannel marketing campaigns with ease.”
Hightouch, which doesn’t itself store data, allows teams to declare the data in a data warehouse they want to sync to each destination — building and syncing audiences and experiments to marketing software like Salesforce, HubSpot and Google Ads. The platform’s tools also transform the data warehouse-stored data, turning it into unified customer profiles that can then be used for analytics, customer segmentation and activation.
Hightouch offers a “personalization API” that lets companies access personalization models built within their warehouse to power customer applications. And it delivers tools to improve “ad-audience syncs” — i.e. targeting known customers based on personally identifiable information — at destinations like Facebook and Google, supporting use cases like suppressing existing customers or building lookalike audiences.
“Overall, the industry is converging on our thesis that the data warehouse should become the root of your customer data platform,” Gupta said. “The industry is adapting to the newfound affordability and power of the data warehouse.”
To Gupta’s point, Hightouch has a respectably large customer base — more than 500 customers — that includes brands like Spotify, Weight Watchers and the NBA. The company plans to spend the new capital, which was led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Iconiq, Y Combinator and Amplify Partners, on customer success and acquisition in addition to R&D.
“The new money … extends our runway and financial position to be able to prioritize our long-term vision of helping everyone in a company take action on data,” Gupta said.
Hightouch has raised around $90 million to date, and it employs a team of 93 people.
