Traditionally, marketers have relied on skilled designers and other creative professionals to produce visuals and videos for tailored online advertising campaigns.
In late 2024, Hightouch, a seven-year-old startup, introduced an innovative AI-powered service. This new offering empowers marketing professionals to generate custom content for prominent brands such as Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify, entirely bypassing the need for internal brand design teams or external ad agencies.
This AI solution has achieved remarkable success. Hightouch has reported to TechCrunch that since the launch of its AI product 20 months ago, it has added an impressive $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), bringing the startup's total ARR to $100 million.
“Before Gen AI, it was impossible for someone without many, many years of design skills to create consumer-level assets,” stated Kashish Gupta, Hightouch’s co-CEO. The company is also co-led by Tejas Manohar, a former engineering manager at Segment, a customer data platform acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020.
However, Hightouch’s distinctive approach extends beyond the capabilities of standard, standalone AI models.
Hightouch notes that many brands initially attempted to develop ad campaigns using general foundational models—broad AI systems that power tools like chatbots but lack specific brand knowledge. These attempts often resulted in images and videos that failed to meet essential “on-brand” standards.
Gupta explained that “Foundation models didn’t know about specific consumer brands, whether it was colors or fonts, tone, or assets.” He further elaborated, “The LLMs would hallucinate products that didn’t exist, and you can’t do advertising and emails on products that didn’t exist.”
To ensure robust brand consistency, Hightouch integrates directly with its customers’ existing creative tools. This includes popular design platforms like Figma, extensive photo libraries, and content management systems (CMS).
By drawing from these established sources, the platform "learns" a company's unique brand identity. Hightouch’s AI agents then leverage these photos, designs, and customer insights to assist marketers in autonomously building personalized ad campaigns, thereby eliminating the typical waiting periods for designers or developers.
The core objective of Hightouch’s AI is to generate images and videos that possess the polished aesthetic of professionally designed content, successfully avoiding the "fake" or generic appearance often associated with AI-generated output.
“For example, Domino’s will never generate a pizza,” Gupta clarified. “They’ll always use existing images of pizza, and they’ll place it into an ad where the background might be generated, and other things might be generated around it.”
The company, which currently employs approximately 380 individuals, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025, following an $80 million Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.
Pictured above, from left to right: Tejas Manohar and Kashish Gupta.
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