Hightouch raises $150M at $2.75B to make AI agents the future of marketing
Hightouch, a San Francisco-based AI marketing platform, has raised $150M in a Series D round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives' Growth Equity division and Bain Capital Ventures, at a $2.75B valuation.
TD7, the venture arm of adtech firm The Trade Desk, also participated, alongside Amplify, ICONIQ, Sapphire Ventures, and Y Combinator. The valuation more than doubles the $1.2B the company achieved in its February 2025 Series C, when it raised $80M.
Founded in 2018 by co-chief executive officers Tejas Manohar and Kashish Gupta , Hightouch started as a data pipeline tool for audience segmentation.
It has since repositioned as an agentic marketing platform — one that trains AI agents on a client's existing brand communications and data to autonomously research audiences, generate on-brand creative, and execute campaigns across advertising, email, SMS, and the web.
Customers include PetSmart, DraftKings, and HelloFresh. The company surpassed $100M in estimated annual recurring revenue in 2026 and has grown more than 100% in each of the past two years.
Enterprise marketing is at an inflection point. The first wave of AI in marketing produced faster content generation but little structural change — most marketers had yet to see real gains.
Hightouch is betting that the second wave, driven by AI agents that can operate autonomously on proprietary customer data, will reshape the category more fundamentally. Its key differentiator is using a brand's own historical data and imagery to avoid the generic, off-brand output that has made much AI-generated marketing easy to spot.
Goldman and Bain's entry also comes as speculation mounts that AI will disrupt legacy marketing software incumbents — a thesis that has already compressed valuations across the sector and created an opening for AI-native challengers to capture enterprise budget.
Hightouch is not planning to be profitable this year or next — it will instead invest in product expansion. That is a defensible strategy at $100M ARR and strong growth, but it leaves the company exposed if the fundraising environment tightens or if revenue growth slows before the platform reaches scale.
The agentic marketing category is also attracting significant competition. Adobe's $1.9B acquisition of Semrush and billion-dollar valuations for newer entrants like Profound signal that every major software vendor is racing to own the AI marketing stack. Hightouch's moat — training agents on proprietary brand data — is real but not impossible to replicate.
Hightouch's $2.75B valuation is a benchmark for a category that barely existed two years ago: AI-native marketing infrastructure. Goldman Sachs' participation through its growth equity arm — rather than a traditional VC — signals that this is no longer an early-stage bet but a conviction call on a company positioned to define a new enterprise software category.
The broader pattern is clear: AI is not just automating marketing tasks, it is restructuring what marketing software needs to be. The winners will be platforms that sit on top of a brand's most trusted data and give AI agents the context they need to act with judgment, not just speed.
Sources:
Hightouch
Business Wire
Wall Street Journal
Pymnts
Finsmes
Image credit:
Hightouch
J.V.
