Hightouch, the leading Data Activation company, announced $38 million in additional funding to launch and grow its Customer 360 offering. The round, led by Bain Capital Ventures, was used to create a new Customer 360 Toolkit that enables data analysts 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 of data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, or Google BiqQuery 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 resolution to transparently gather the data into actionable user profiles and write them back to the customer’s data warehouse
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The product was born out of Hightouch’s rapid growth, supporting the data needs of enterprise customers like Chime, Petsmart, Warner Music, Spotify, and the 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, like identity resolution algorithms and data enrichment,” said 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.
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“The Hightouch team just ‘gets it’ when it comes to customer data activation in the real world,” said Jason Feng at 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 like CRM, e-mail, customer support, and advertising. In the last six months, the company also launched a real-time Personalization API, a Match Booster advertising product, and an upgraded no-code audience builder product Customer Studio.
Bain Capital Ventures led this investment round, joined by existing investors ICONIQ Capital and Amplify Partners.
“As investors since the Series A, we’ve had front-row seats as Hightouch pioneered the Reverse ETL category, becoming in just a few years an essential component of modern data infrastructure,” said Kevin Zhang, Partner at 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.”
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