We’ve raised $80M at $1.2B to build an agentic marketing platform called AI Decisioning

We’re delighted to share that Hightouch has raised $80 million at a $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. This investment is a huge vote of confidence in the future of Hightouch, and we’re beyond grateful to our customers, partners, employees, and investors for their support.

While the funding is exciting, what really motivates us is our vision for agentic marketing and how much impact these agents will make for our customers. We’d like to take a minute to share how we’ll use the new funds to bring that vision to life. It starts with the core challenge of marketing today: relevance.

AI agents give every customer a personalized customer experience

“We want to send the right message to the right customer at the right time”

This is a phrase we’ve heard for years. While it’s old, it still strikes a nerve. Customers are inundated with e-mails, texts, and ads. It’s more difficult than ever for brands to break through. While we’ve made progress towards this as Hightouch but also as an industry, enabling marketers to deliver truly relevant communications on a 1:1 basis is far from solved.

Last year we asked ourselves what it would take to really make a difference for marketers. While our Composable CDP product is growing very quickly (> 100% last year) and providing a ton of value to customers, we realized that we couldn’t just build better tooling for how marketing is done today - years of incremental improvement hadn’t really fixed the problem of relevance. 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.

What good is more content if you don’t know where and when to use it? That’s how we came up with our newest product, AI Decisioning.

AI Decisioning is a step-function change in how marketing works. Instead of pre-planning every experience using rigid rules and timing, marketers can simply assign a goal like “drive customers who buy in-store to download our app and order ahead” and then watch as AI agents use approved content to deliver personalized communications to every individual consumer across channels like email, push, in-app, and advertising.

Screenshot of Hightouch’s AI Decisioning product.

Not only do AI agents optimize every customer’s journey but they also automatically run experiments and uncover rich insights into what’s working for different cohorts of customers. Marketing teams can then use those insights to adjust their content, creative, and marketing strategy.

Example insights surfaced to Whoop by AI Decisioning on how fitness interests correlate with cross-sell opportunities

AI Decisioning relies on a combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and other models that we’ve built in house. RL does an extraordinarily good job at marketing, because it looks at the chain of all past customer actions and determines which chain of campaigns and experiences will get the customer to the highest LTV state. Unique to Hightouch is that we give marketers the power to self-serve and create these marketing agents. Each Hightouch customer is setting up their own RL agent, giving it goals, guardrails, and campaigns the agent can access. Because of this, the agents are the marketer’s unique business, and the consumer’s unique journey.

While we launched AI Decisioning recently, our team has been hard at work for 18 months, and we’re proud of the results and feedback from customers. Because we spent the last 4 years building the best-in-class Composable CDP, we were able to build the framework for agents much more quickly on top of our existing IP. We were able to reuse the integrations, the data layer, and the orchestration that we had already built, and that we will continue to invest in.

So what’s next?

We believe AI will be a major disruptor to the marketing workflow. While we’re excited about our progress and customer feedback, AI Decisioning is still a new frontier. There’s a lot to continue building from the core product experience (model enhancements, more insights capabilities, flexibility for marketers, etc.) to completely untapped opportunities around content feedback and suggestions. We have a big vision here.

For many campaigns, marketers will want to be in full control—for example, major brand pushes. For an increasing number of use cases, particularly evergreen initiatives like cross-sells, frequency, winbacks, etc., marketers will leverage AI Decisioning. We are still laser focused on delivering the best Composable CDP for our customers, and we believe the two products will compound in how they impact marketing orgs. No matter how marketers choose to operate for each campaign, Hightouch will be the strategic partner that enables them to turn their data into action.

And the best part? This data-driven future is a win for brands and consumers. Consumers receive more relevant, timely, and valuable experiences. Brands learn faster, operate more efficiently, and achieve better results.

We’re beyond excited to bring this new way of working to every large brand in the world. The future of marketing is here, and it’s powered by Hightouch.

Thank you for being part of our journey. We can’t wait to show you what’s next.