Led by Sapphire Ventures, funding will accelerate adoption of the company’s AI Decisioning product for customers such as PetSmart, WHOOP, and Accor Hotels

Hightouch, the leading data and AI platform for marketing and personalization, announced that it has raised an $80 million Series C at a valuation of $1.2 billion. The round was led by Rajeev Dham at Sapphire Ventures, with participation from NVC, ICONIQ Growth, Amplify Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator.

The investment will help drive adoption of the company’s AI Decisioning product, which allows marketers to simply identify a business goal and then lets AI agents deliver the optimal 1:1 marketing experiences that will achieve that goal. AI Decisioning and Hightouch’s original Composable CDP product have enabled the company to more than double revenue in the last year and to add numerous enterprise customers like PetSmart, Spotify, and Accor Hotels.

“We’ve talked about 1:1 personalization for years, but it’s not possible with the way marketers work today. Everything is too slow, too manual, and usually results in customers receiving a blizzard of irrelevant communications,” said Tejas Manohar, cofounder and co-CEO at Hightouch. “Our vision is to use AI to help marketers break free of manual work. Instead of building rigid calendars and static journeys that are inherently impersonal, marketers can simply enter goals like ‘drive repeat purchases and subscriptions’ and let AI agents decide what to do next at a 1:1 level. It’s a reimagining of the job of being a marketer.”

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Enterprises in particular are embracing AI Decisioning to achieve long-standing goals that have been difficult to achieve with traditional methods.

“Hightouch is a key part of our strategy for connecting and building loyalty with our pet parents,” said Bradley Breuer, Vice President of Marketing, Loyalty, CRM, and Insights at PetSmart. “We have more than 70 million Treats Rewards members in our loyalty program and use AI Decisioning to personalize marketing communications for each of our members, making their experience more meaningful, while supporting growth for our business.”

AI Decisioning is a neutral technology that works with all existing enterprise data and marketing platforms. It can sit on top of any data warehouse or CDP and trigger actions across any marketing or digital platform, including Salesforce, Adobe, Iterable, and Braze.

“Our platform uses a combination of reinforcement learning and other models to decide the best message, channel, and timing for each customer. We automatically run high-scale experiments to learn what marketing message is most relevant to each consumer, and we’re quickly adding support for more channels like in-app experiences, advertising, and offer management,” said Kashish Gupta, cofounder and co-CEO at Hightouch. “The top use case we’re seeing is driving loyalty and frequency of purchase. It’s harder than ever for brands to be relevant, and we believe agentic marketing is the solution.”

AI Decisioning increases lifetime value by:

• Precisely targeting individual customers, moving beyond broad segmentation
• Personalizing content at scale for each user
• Optimizing message frequency and timing for maximum impact
• Automating the testing process, eliminating time-consuming manual A/B testing
• Orchestrating experiences across channels like email, SMS, apps, and web

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“Open up your phone right now. Do you think the marketing you’re receiving is as good as it could be?” said Rajeev Dham, Partner at Sapphire Ventures. “With AI Decisioning, which automatically determines the best messages to serve up, Hightouch has shown the bold vision and technical know-how to fix both the marketer and customer experience problem once and for all. It’s a huge idea, and we’re excited to partner with Kashish, Tejas, Josh, and the entire team on it.”

The investment will be used to hire engineering, product, and go-to-market talent that will support enterprise adoption of the Hightouch Composable CDP as well as accelerate AI Decisioning development and deployment among Fortune 500 enterprises.