$1.2bn Valuation for Automated Marketing Firm Hightouch

In San Francisco, marketing and personalization platform Hightouch has announced the raising of an $80m series C round, valuing the company at $1.2bn. Funds will help the company hire for engineering, product and go-to-market functions, and accelerate its development of AI Decisioning software.

Hightouch helps client companies activate their data warehouse to deliver personalized customer experiences, optimize performance marketing (including automated A/B testing), and make use of data and AI across their organization. The firm's original Composable CDP product has been joined by an AI Decisioning product which allows marketers to simply identify a business goal and then let AI agents deliver 'the optimal 1:1 marketing experiences that will achieve that goal'. In 2023 the firm raised $38m in funding, announced a customer profiling tool called Customer 360 Toolkit, and acquired data profiling and modeling specialist HeadsUp, and last month it partnered with Databricks to develop a self-service audience management and measurement platform.

The latest round was led by Rajeev Dham at Sapphire Ventures, with participation from NVC, ICONIQ Growth, Amplify Partners, Bain Capital Ventures and Y Combinator. Tejas Manohar (pictured), co-founder and co-CEO at Hightouch comments: 'We've talked about 1:1 personalization for years, but it's not possible with the way marketers work today. Everything is too slow, too manual, and usually results in customers receiving a blizzard of irrelevant communications. Our vision is to use AI to help marketers break free of manual work. Instead of building rigid calendars and static journeys that are inherently impersonal, marketers can simply enter goals like 'drive repeat purchases and subscriptions' and let AI agents decide what to do next at a 1:1 level. It's a reimagining of the job of being a marketer'.

Web site: www.hightouch.com .