Hightouch Raised $322 Million Across Six Rounds. Here's How the Company Skyrocketed to a $2.75 Billion Valuation

On January 10, Kashish Gupta, co-founder of the AI marketing firm Hightouch, was on a flight from India back to the U.S. Over the holidays, the entrepreneur had flown to India to meet his in-laws for the first time. He was pulling together a pitch deck on a long-haul flight to San Francisco for a fundraising process he’d kick off the following day. By January 31, term sheets were in his inbox. And by late April, Gupta and his co-founders, co-CEO Tejas Manohar and CTO Josh Curl had closed a Series D round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Bain Capital Ventures worth $150 million. TD7, the investment arm of The Trade Desk, also participated. Today, the company, which counts Domino's Pizza, DoorDash, PetSmart, and Aritzia among its clientele, is valued at $2.75 billion. It has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR and is among the fastest-growing startups in marketing. This week on the French Riviera at adland’s biggest annual event, Cannes Lions, the startup is making a splash. It took out big out-of-home spots at the Nice Airport claiming that, with Hightouch, marketers can create a full ad campaign before they even get their luggage at baggage claim. On the ground, the name has popped up again and again in conversation. The company is also pretty brash: Last week it approached the French advertising giant Publicis with an offer of up to $1.2 billion to buy the identity business at the heart of LiveRamp, a property Publicis just agreed to acquire in a $2.2 billion deal announced last month. How that move will pan out remains to be seen. Publicis declined to comment. Founded in 2018 as part of the iconic startup incubator Y Combinator, Hightouch was originally called Carry, and operated an AI travel agent that Gupta described as “ChatGPT for travel,” baked into Slack. Eventually, the company shifted its focus to helping marketers get access to data and target ads to the right audiences more effectively. It pivoted again in 2024; in response to complaints from marketers that their biggest challenge wasn’t data access but content generation. Hightouch poured engineering resources into building a solution. Now, the company uses AI to help brands create hyper-personalized, on-brand content and campaigns at scale. On its fundraising strategy, Gupta said the team has been selective about who it takes funding from. It seeks backers who can serve as strategic long-term partners, helping Hightouch attract the business of large consumer brands, and, eventually, go public. The startup is confident that TD7, along with Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Bain Capital Ventures will help it get there. The fresh $150 million infusion will be used primarily for hiring. Hightouch is looking to build out its engineering staff as well as the forward deployed team responsible for helping brands actually extract value from its tech. Throughout its journey, investors have not stopped knocking on its door. Here’s how Hightouch became a Cannes Lions darling and won the backing of some of the most influential VCs in the game. December 2020: $2.1M - Seed Round In 2019, Hightouch was operating as Carry, running an AI-powered travel agent service. Its first major infusion, a $600,000 round, came from Y Combinator, which put in around $150,000. During 2019 and 2020, a smattering of other investors, including the cofounder and CEO of Datadog Olivier Pomel, investor and former Google engineer Leo Polovets, and two of the founders of customer data platform Segment, invested in the company. Ironically, (an irony considering Carry’s later pivot to become Hightouch would put the companies in direct competition). The venture capital firms NFX and Afore Capital also contributed. The company lumped various investments into a December 2020 announcement confirming it had raised a total of $2.1 million in seed funding. Now, Hightouch was off to the races. July 2021: $12.1M - Series A Responding to customer feedback, the company rebranded to Hightouch and pivoted to developing a product to port customer data straight into the platforms that employees at companies regularly use, like CRMs, ad networks, and marketing platforms. It developed a reverse ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) product designed to make it easier for people working in sales, marketing, and operations roles to access and work with customer data. “It was basically data pipelines for marketers to be able to send data from their databases through ad tools, and they got really excited about this idea,” Gupta explained. It also attracted the interest of a swarm of investors. “This is where things kind of turned, and investors had way more interest in Hightouch than we had interest in raising money,” Gupta said. The Hightouch team, which at that stage included just four people, had no pitch deck. It didn’t actively seek out funding. Nonetheless, both Amplify Partners and Bain Capital offered up term sheets, and Hightouch decided to take funding from both. Amplify led the round. It was an ideal strategic matchup, according to Gupta, as investors at both Bain and Amplify were pursuing a budding thesis that data warehouses would become increasingly central to business. At the time, pre-AI boom, dollars were pouring into this space; companies focused on modernizing and unifying the data stack, like DBT Labs, Fivetran, Monte Carlo, were raising at high valuations around this time. Hightouch raised $12.1 million Series A at a $75 million valuation with only $50,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). November 2021: $40M - Series B As Hightouch continued to evolve, it brought on more talent, growing to 35 employees. It also began to achieve real enterprise traction and scale, reaching $1.3 million in ARR. Soon, more funds were knocking on Hightouch’s door—quite literally. While Hightouch had handled previous pitches via Zoom, two senior partners at Iconiq Capital, the global firm that has been a major backer of the AI lab Anthropic, wanted to visit the Hightouch office in the fall of 2021.One of those partners was Matthew Jacobson, who previously sat on the board of Snowflake, among the heavyweights of the data warehousing space. He would be well-equipped to assess Hightouch’s value. “Most founders go to the VC’s office to present,” not the other way around, Gupta said. “So, for them, it was a cool new experience where they're going to the startup’s office.” In that office, there was, once again, no pitch deck to greet the suitors. Gupta had prepared a basic Notion document with internal talking points for him and his cofounders to reference, but they’d adopted a casual approach. “We would just talk, and sometimes we’d demo the product,” he said. Asked whether the Iconiq team or other investors were put off by the lax attitude, Gupta shrugged off the suggestion. “Good investors care about the strength of the team, actual metrics, and actual customers,” Gupta said. “We had all those.” Sometimes, investors would say: “‘Oh, you have no deck,’” he recalled. “I'd be like, ‘Yeah, but here's my Salesforce pipeline,’ and they would see all the customers we're talking to and the quality of the names. And then they'd ask me about some of those deals, and I’d tell them exactly who we were talking to in that deal, how much they're going to pay us, and when it was going to close. That gave them conviction that our traction was real and not a pitch.” As five or six term sheets found their way onto Gupta’s desk, the Hightouch leadership team felt it had found a strategic partner in Iconiq, even though they hadn’t been looking. “There were investors that have given us offers up to $500 million post-money. We went with Iconiq at $450 million post-money, because they were a really strong firm, and we thought they could help us break into enterprise,” Gupta explained. Iconiq also has investments in and strong ties to a wide range of enterprise businesses, Hightouch’s target customers. Iconiq led the $40 million round, which again included participation from Amplify and Bain Capital. July 2023: $38M - SAFE By mid-2023, Hightouch had already amassed over 500 customers. Among them: Spotify, the NBA, and Weight Watchers. It was still focused on helping companies sync various customer data across different parts of their tech stack. It positioned its composable CDP as an alternative to more mainstream, less flexible offerings on the market. The company decided to accept a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) deal, a kind of financing option developed by Y Combinator that allows investors to provide cash with an option to convert that investment into equity in a future financing round. Though it was somewhat unusual for companies of Hightouch’s maturity to accept a SAFE, the company felt it was appropriate because it would provide a kind of protection at an unstable moment in the market. “The valuation environment around the time we raised the SAFE was very uncertain,” Gupta said. “We had a lot of investors who wanted to back the company but didn't want to overly dilute current shareholders, so the SAFE structure allowed us to get capital into the business without locking in a price immediately.” Bain Capital Ventures led the $38 million round, with participation from ICONIQ Capital, Amplify Partners, and Y Combinator. It valued Hightouch at $615 million. At the time, Gupta told TechCrunch that the money would “[extend] our runway and financial position to be able to prioritize our long-term vision of helping everyone in a company take action on data.” Hightouch planned to use the funds for R&D and customer acquisition. February 2025: $80M - Series C For over a year, Hightouch eschewed fundraising, despite ongoing interest. “The best companies are never seeking capital—they're always receiving capital,” Gupta told ADWEEK. One investor, however, was especially persistent: Sapphire Ventures. Some of the VC’s execs, including managing director Rajeev Dham, had known Hightouch’s founders for years and had closely followed its ascent. Dham had previously invested in—and sat on the board at—Segment, a Hightouch rival.“The dynamic between us and Sapphire was like, Rajeev calls me every six months and he's like, ‘Hey, you guys are crushing it, you should raise a round,’ and every six months I'm like, ‘No, I'm all good, I don't want to raise any money,’” Gupta joked. Eventually, he said, Hightouch was fielding a “critical mass” of interest.It was around this time, in late 2024, when the startup was undergoing a transformation. It moved beyond just data plumbing and into true AI-led marketing. The company was already doing about $35 million in ARR. With its latest pivot, it was confident that it could hit $80 million in ARR the following year.“That's why the round got done, because people were like, ‘Holy shit, this is like growing so quickly,’” Gupta recalled. It worked: In 2025, Hightouch would breeze right past that benchmark.Sapphire led the round $80 million Series C. It was a good strategic fit for Hightouch, because like Iconiq, Sapphire brought deep enterprise experience to the table, Gupta said. The startup hoped that Sapphire would help open doors into some of the world’s biggest businesses. Additional participants included NVC, Bain Capital Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Y Combinator, Afore Capital, and Amplify Partners.The company’s valuation soared to $1.2 billion. Investors were confident in Hightouch’s ability to build out and scale an AI-driven intelligence layer capable of helping marketers deliver custom messages to individual customers. April 2026: $150M - Series D As Hightouch matured, securing business from blue-chip brands like Spotify and Doordash, and growing to a headcount above 400, Gupta and his team decided it was ready to gear up for a potential Wall Street debut. “We believe it's a really positive time for public markets,” Gupta said. That meant entertaining more investment options, and making a more calculated decision.The Hightouch leadership team decided to develop a formal pitch deck for the first time. It was a way to showcase more concrete metrics. The team took meetings with “all the largest funds,” according to Gupta, including not just VCs, but also major wealth managers, and sovereign wealth funds. After making the rounds during a whirlwind few weeks at the start of this year, Hightouch had received “quite a few” term sheets, Gupta said.The startup ultimately settled on the Growth Equity team at Goldman Sachs Alternatives to lead the round. It wanted to continue deepening its access to enterprise clientele, something it was sure Goldman could provide, and it believed that Goldman’s involvement would serve as a prized, credible signal to the market about Hightouch’s potential in the public markets.“They're known to be pretty conservative, so people take their valuation and assessment very seriously,” Gupta said. “A lot of investors will put money in without doing any real diligence whatsoever, and so it doesn't mean much when they invest, but Goldman wrote a 180-page memo about their investment in Hightouch.” Anchored in Goldman’s reputation, the Series D, Gupta hopes, is Hightouch’s IPO path-paving round. Fundraising, according to Gupta, is less about pitch decks and more about taking relationships seriously. “Any investor we ever meet, we just start working with them as if they've already invested, even if they don't invest,” Gupta said. His network consists of a wide range of investors who aren’t on Hightouch’s cap table, but don’t mind helping out with advice and industry intros, he suggested. “There are so many VCs that I work with for customer intros, and just regular business development, and this is actually a good way for investors to see how you work,” he said. By the time the next fundraise rolls around, ideally a handful of firms already have “enough context…to make that decision in less than three weeks.”

Term Sheet

Hightouch Raised $322 Million Across Six Rounds. Here's How the Company Skyrocketed to a $2.75 Billion Valuation

Co-founder Kashish Gupta says good investors care about metrics and customers, not slides. A round-by-round look at how every deal came together

UNLOCK FULL ACCESS

Kendra Barnett

Dealroom

Perion Exits Nasdaq in $420M Sale to India’s Affle as Open-Web Squeeze Continues

Elon Musk Reportedly Invests $1 Billion Into Skydance After WBD Merger

Salesforce to Buy Braze for $5.66 Billion

Layoffs on the Way as Skydance Now Controls Paramount and WBD

Social Agency SAMY Buys Influencer Shop Get Engaged in Low Nine-Figure Deal

Savage Ventures Weighs $60M-$70M Bid for Insolvent Comments Platform OpenWeb

Morning Brew Acquires Express Checkout in Latest Creator Play

Michael Kassan Invests in $80M Startup OptimizeGEO

Slow Ventures Backs 3 More Creators in Its $64 Million Bet on Niche ‘Cults’