high toucha platform that helps companies sync customer data between different backend databases and systems, announced today that it has 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’s house” in San Francisco’s Mission district. Manohar and Curl were increasingly disillusioned with the customer data platform industry they had previously worked in, largely because they saw it create a divide between data and marketing teams.
“We put a lot of effort into centralizing the data in the data warehouse and integrating it with downstream systems,” Gupta, who is co-CEO of Hightouch, told TechCrunch via email. “Seeing the value of a data warehouse-centric data architecture, we continually questioned why a customer data platform like Segment wasn’t doing it.”
Gupta described Hightouch as a “composable” customer data platform, that is, one that enables marketers to use data directly from data warehouses through no-code tools. (Recall that a data warehouse is a system for reporting, analytics and data analysis, especially business analysis.) He added that Hightouch aims to complete the “last mile” of data analysis — actually using analytics to drive key business outcomes.
“Hightouch is a tool that can help you derive business value from data analysis,” said Gupta. “The platform provides marketers with direct access to company data, enabling them to easily activate data to support personalized omnichannel marketing campaigns.”
Hightouch doesn’t store data itself, it allows teams to declare in the data warehouse the data they want synced to each destination – building audiences and experiments and syncing them to marketing software like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Google Ads. The platform’s tools can also transform the data stored in the data warehouse, turning it into a unified customer profile that can then be used for analysis, customer segmentation and activation.
Hightouch offers a “personalization API” that gives companies access to the personalization models built in its warehouse to power customer applications. It also offers tools to improve “ad audience sync” — that is, targeting known customers based on personally identifiable information — in destinations like Facebook and Google, enabling use cases like suppressing existing customers or building lookalike audiences.
“Overall, the industry is sharing our view that the data warehouse should be the foundation of the customer data platform,” Gupta said. “The industry is adapting to the newfound affordability and power of the data warehouse.”
According to Gupta, Hightouch has a fairly large client base — more than 500 clients — that includes brands like Spotify, Weight Watchers and the NBA. The company plans to use the new funding, led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Iconiq, Y Combinator and Amplify Partners, for customer success and acquisitions in addition to research and development.
“The new funding … expands our runway and financial position to be able to prioritize our long-term vision of helping everyone in the company take action on data,” Gupta said.
Hightouch has raised about $90 million to date and has a team of 93 employees.
