Hightouch, a Y Combinator-backed startup for AI marketing, announced Tuesday that it raised $80 million in Series C funding at $1.2 billion valuation. The round was led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from NVC, Bain Capital Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Y Combinator, Afore Capital, and Amplify Partners.
Founded by Kashish Gupta, Tejas Manohar, and Josh Curl, the marketing startup uses AI agents to deliver personalized experiences across multiple channels like email, push notifications, and ads. Rather than relying on rigid rules, AI agents optimize each customer’s journey, automatically running experiments and providing insights into what works for different groups of customers.
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Hightouch plans to use the fresh capital for building its newest marketing product “AI Decisioning” which is based on reinforcement learning (RL)—it analyzes past customer behavior and determines the best marketing strategies. The product lets marketers steer the wheel by setting goals and create custom AI agents tailored to their business, ensuring that each marketing campaign is unique and efficient.
Built on their existing product Composable CDP, AI Decisioning is already delivering significant results with strong customer feedback. Hightouch’s customer base includes brands like Autotrader, Spotify, Cars.com, Grammarly, and PetSmart.
Despite the rapid growth of its Composable CDP product—more than 100% last year—and its significant value to customers, the company recognized that simply enhancing existing marketing tools was not enough. Years of incremental improvements had failed to fully address the core challenge of relevance. In 2024, Hightouch’s team asked themselves what it would take to really make a difference for marketers and came up with the following:
“We had to rethink the problem from scratch. We spoke to marketing and digital leaders at some of the largest retail, media, and financial services companies in the world, and we learned that they don’t just want to use AI to write copy; they need an intelligence layer that decides what the best message is for each individual customer,” the founders stated in a media release. The result was AI Decisioning.
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Gupta had previously founded Mama’s Cookin’, a marketplace app for home-cooked meals. He was also a venture capitalist investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, and Product Manager at Lynk.
Manohar had previously worked at Segment, and also been Lead Engineer at Lottery.com. Curl is also the co-founder of DevicePlane, a commercial, open source company for accessing and managing remote IoT fleets, backed by Accel and Y Combinator.
Looking ahead, Hightouch plans on expanding AI Decisioning’s capabilities, in order to provide even more flexibility and insights for marketers through their AI-driven approach to help brands deliver more relevant, timely experiences to customers, while also improving operational efficiency and marketing outcomes.