Hightouch, the leading Data Activation company, announced $38 million in additional funding to launch and grow its Customer 360 offering.ย The round, led byย Bain Capital Ventures, was used to create a newย Customer 360 Toolkitย that enablesย data analystsย to build unified customer profiles on top of their raw customer data without months of engineering effort.
For years, businesses have struggled to deeply understand their customers and communicate with them in a personalized way. One of the biggest challenges has been resolving a single identity in a sea of disorganized and disjointed data. Customer data is often incomplete and spread across multiple systems and dozens to thousands of tables.
With Hightouch Customer 360 Toolkit, the common work that data teams are tasked with is simplified and provides the ability to complete that work faster with built-in best practices. It works by sitting directly on top ofย data warehousesย likeย Snowflake,ย Databricks,ย Redshift, orย Google BiqQueryย and allows companies to quickly and easily prepare their customer data for activation. The new product is the first warehouse-native solution that lets analytics and marketing teams handle customer data preparation without engineering support. It includes:
- Visual schema builder to organize data with an intuitive visual UI
- Warehouse enrichment to add additional or missing attributes the business needs
- Identity resolutionย to transparently gather the data into actionableย user profilesย and write them back to the customer’sย data warehouse
CIO INFLUENCE: CIO Influence Interview with Lior Yaari, CEO and Co-Founder at Grip Security
The product was born out of Hightouch’s rapid growth, supporting the data needs of enterprise customers like Chime,ย Petsmart,ย Warner Music,ย Spotify, and theย NBA.
“Over the last three years, we’ve helped hundreds of large brands activate their customer data for sales and marketing. Along the way, we studied how companies clean, organize, and prepare their customer data for activation. In every industry, we found teams spending time on repetitive work, likeย identity resolutionย algorithms and data enrichment,” saidย Kashish Gupta, co-CEO of Hightouch. “This new funding allows us to build out the product and engineering team necessary to embark on this large endeavor and to shoot for the stars with a larger vision.”
More than 400 enterprise analytics and marketing teams now use Hightouch to quickly and efficiently activate their customer data. Many see this new capability as a game changer for their marketing initiatives.
CIO INFLUENCE: CIO Influence Interview with Russ Ernst, Chief Technology Officer at Blancco
“The Hightouch team just ‘gets it’ when it comes to customer data activation in the real world,” saidย Jason Fengย atย Zeplin. “The ROI from our partnership with Hightouch is the highest amongst our marketing and data investments. This new customer 360 capability is exactly what we need to move even faster on our data activation journey.”
The launch of Customer 360 Toolkit builds on a year of industry-leading product innovation. Hightouch recently launched its 200th connector for platforms likeย CRM, e-mail,ย customer support, and advertising. In the last six months, the company also launched a real-timeย Personalization API, a Match Booster advertising product, and an upgradedย no-codeย audience builder product Customer Studio.
Bain Capital Venturesย led this investment round, joined by existing investorsย ICONIQ Capitalย and Amplify Partners.
“As investors since the Series A, we’ve hadย front-rowย seats as Hightouch pioneered theย Reverse ETLย category, becoming in just a few years an essential component of modernย data infrastructure,” saidย Kevin Zhang, Partner atย Bain Capital Ventures. “Hightouch is taking their market opportunity to the next level with Customer 360 Toolkit. Even in a difficult market for software, we’ve seen exceptional customer adoption from business teams confident in Hightouch and eager to personalize and enrich campaigns without needing expensive, time-consuming integration work.”
CIO INFLUENCE: CIO Influence Interview with Bill Lobig, VP of Product Management at IBM Automation
[To share your insights with us, please write toย sghosh@martechseries.com]
