Hightouch hits $100M ARR with AI-powered marketing tools

In the past, marketers depended on designers and other creative specialists to produce images and videos for personalized online advertising campaigns.

In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch introduced an AI-driven service that enables marketing professionals to generate custom content for brands like Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify — without needing input from brand design teams or advertising agencies.

This offering has proven remarkably successful. Since deploying its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch reports adding $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), pushing the startup’s total ARR to $100 million.

“Before generative AI, creating consumer-grade assets was impossible for anyone without years of design expertise,” said Kashish Gupta, co-CEO of Hightouch. The company is also steered by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, formerly an engineering manager at Segment — a customer data platform that Twilio acquired for $3.2 billion in 2020.

Yet Hightouch’s method goes far beyond what typical AI models can achieve independently.

According to Hightouch, many brands initially tried generating ad campaigns with general foundation models — broad AI systems that drive tools like chatbots but have no understanding of specific brands — only to discover the resulting images and videos fell short of “on-brand” standards.

“Foundation models had no knowledge of specific consumer brands — whether it was colors, fonts, tone, or assets,” says Gupta. “The LLMs would hallucinate products that never existed, and you cannot run advertising or email campaigns on products that don’t exist.”

To maintain brand consistency, Hightouch connects directly to its customers’ existing creative tools — including the popular design platform Figma, photo libraries, and content management systems (CMS).

By drawing from these sources, the platform “learns” each company’s unique brand identity. Hightouch’s AI agents then leverage those photos, designs, and customer insights to help marketers create personalized ad campaigns autonomously — without needing to wait for designers or developers.

The aim of Hightouch’s AI is to produce images and videos that appear crafted by professional designers, avoiding the “fake” or generic appearance frequently linked to AI-generated content.

“For example, Domino’s will never generate a pizza,” Gupta explains. “They will always use existing pizza images, and then place that into an ad where the background and other elements might be AI-generated around it.”

The company, which now employs around 380 people, reached a valuation of $1.2 billion in February 2025 after raising an $80 million Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.

Pictured above, from left to right: Tejas Manohar and Kashish Gupta