Hightouch secures $80M Series C to expand AI-driven marketing capabilities

Hightouch, a company specializing in AI-powered marketing solutions, has announced an $80 million Series C funding round, valuing the firm at $1.2 billion. Sapphire Ventures led the investment, with contributions from NVC, ICONIQ Growth, Amplify Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator.

The fresh capital will support the expansion of Hightouch’s AI Decisioning technology, which enables marketers to automate and optimize customer engagement strategies. The system allows businesses to define their marketing objectives while AI agents dynamically adjust campaigns to align with user behaviors. The platform has contributed to the company’s revenue growth, with enterprise clients such as PetSmart, Spotify, and Accor Hotels adopting its solutions.

Hightouch co-founder and co-CEO Tejas Manohar emphasized the challenges marketers face in achieving effective one-on-one personalization. Traditional marketing methods, often reliant on rigid workflows and manual interventions, fail to deliver tailored experiences at scale. The company’s AI Decisioning technology seeks to bridge this gap by autonomously managing marketing strategies based on specified business goals. Marketers can set objectives such as increasing repeat purchases, while AI agents determine the most effective engagement methods for each individual customer.

For large enterprises, this technology represents an opportunity to enhance customer retention and loyalty. PetSmart’s Vice President of Marketing, Loyalty, CRM, and Insights, Bradley Breuer, highlighted the platform’s role in managing the company’s Treats Rewards program, which serves over 70 million members. By integrating AI Decisioning, PetSmart aims to deliver more relevant and personalized communications, ultimately fostering customer loyalty and driving business growth.

Hightouch’s AI Decisioning system is designed to work alongside existing marketing and data platforms. It integrates with data warehouses and customer data platforms (CDPs) and can coordinate messaging across multiple channels, including Salesforce, Adobe, Iterable, and Braze.

Co-founder and co-CEO Kashish Gupta explained that the platform leverages reinforcement learning models to refine messaging strategies, selecting optimal content, timing, and channels for each customer. The system continuously runs large-scale experiments to improve engagement and conversion rates, with support extending to in-app experiences, digital advertising, and promotional offers. According to Gupta, a key use case for the technology is enhancing customer loyalty and increasing purchase frequency, a growing challenge in competitive markets.

The Series C funding will be used to expand Hightouch’s engineering and go-to-market teams, focusing on accelerating AI Decisioning adoption among enterprise clients. The company plans to further develop its Composable CDP, positioning it as a flexible data activation solution for businesses seeking to streamline their marketing operations.

Rajeev Dham, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, noted that AI-driven marketing solutions have the potential to transform customer engagement. He emphasized the need for more intelligent, adaptive marketing strategies, stating that AI Decisioning addresses a fundamental challenge in modern marketing: delivering relevant content to the right audience at the right time.