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

Historically, marketers have relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online advertising campaigns.

End of 2024, seven year old startup Highlight has launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands like Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart and Spotify without the need for brand design teams or advertising agencies.

The offer has been very successful. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), it tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR.

“Before GenAI, it was impossible for someone without many, many years of design skills to create consumer-level assets,” said Kashish Gupta, co-CEO of Hightouch. The company is also led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a former engineering executive at Segment, a customer data platform that Twilio acquired for $3.2 billion in 2020.

However, Hightouch’s approach goes beyond what standard AI models can do on their own.

Hightouch says many brands initially tried to generate ad campaigns using general foundational models – broad AI systems that power tools like chatbots but have no knowledge of specific brands – only to find that the resulting images and videos did not meet on-brand standards.

“Foundation models knew nothing about specific consumer brands, whether it was colors or fonts or tone or assets,” says Gupta. “The LLMs would hallucinate products that didn’t exist, and you can’t advertise and email about products that don’t exist.”

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

By drawing from these sources, the platform ‘learns’ the specific brand identity of a company. Hightouch’s AI agents then use these photos, designs, and customer insights to help marketers autonomously create personalized ad campaigns, without having to wait for designers or developers.

The goal of Hightouch’s AI is to create images and videos that look as if they were created by professional designers, avoiding the ‘fake’ or generic look often associated with AI.

“Domino’s, for example, will never produce a pizza,” says Gupta. “They will always take existing images of pizza and put them in an ad where the background can be generated and other things can be generated around it.”

The company, which now employs about 380 people, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025 when it raised an $80 million Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.

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