Hightouch reaches $100M ARR fueled by marketing tools powered by AI

Historically, marketers relied connected designers and different originative professionals to make images and videos for personalized online advertisement campaigns.

In precocious 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered work that allows selling professionals to make customized contented for brands specified arsenic Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving marque plan teams oregon advertisement agencies.

The offering has been highly successful. Since introducing its AI merchandise 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 cardinal successful annualized recurring gross (ARR), it tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a full of $100 cardinal successful ARR.

“Before Gen AI, it was intolerable for idiosyncratic without many, galore years of plan skills to make consumer-level assets,” said Kashish Gupta, Hightouch’s co-CEO. The institution is besides led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a erstwhile engineering manager astatine Segment, a lawsuit information level acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion successful 2020.

However, Hightouch’s attack goes beyond what modular AI models tin bash connected their own.

Hightouch says that galore brands initially attempted to make advertisement campaigns utilizing wide foundational models — wide AI systems that powerfulness tools similar chatbots but deficiency cognition of circumstantial brands — lone to find the resulting images and videos failed to conscionable “on-brand” standards.

“Foundation models didn’t cognize astir circumstantial user brands, whether it was colors oregon fonts, tone, oregon assets,” Gupta says. “The LLMs would hallucinate products that didn’t exist, and you can’t bash advertizing and emails connected products that don’t exist.”

To guarantee marque consistency, Hightouch connects straight to its customers’ existing originative tools, specified arsenic the fashionable plan level Figma, photograph libraries, and contented absorption systems (CMS).

By pulling from these sources, the level “learns” a company’s circumstantial marque identity. Hightouch’s AI agents past usage these photos, designs, and lawsuit insights to assistance marketers physique personalized advertisement campaigns autonomously, without having to hold connected designers oregon developers.

The extremity of Hightouch’s AI is to make images and videos that look similar they were made by nonrecreational designers, avoiding the “fake” oregon generic look often associated with AI.

“For example, Domino’s volition ne'er make a pizza,” Gupta says. “They’ll ever usage existing images of pizza, and they’ll spot it into an advertisement wherever the inheritance mightiness beryllium generated, and different things mightiness beryllium generated astir it.”

The company, which present employs astir 380 people, was valued astatine $1.2 cardinal successful February 2025 erstwhile it raised an $80 cardinal Series C backing circular led by Sapphire Ventures.

Pictured above, near to right: Tejas Manohar and Kashish Gupta