Hightouch’s AI Ad Tool Cuts Out Design Teams, Hits $100M ARR For The Startup
For generations, marketing teams relied on in-house designers and specialized creative professionals to build custom images and videos for personalized digital ad campaigns. That workflow may be on the brink of change.
In late 2024, seven-year-old B2B startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that lets marketing teams create custom branded content for major clients including Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify — entirely without involving internal brand design teams or external ad agencies.
The new offering has been an immediate breakout success. Hightouch shared with TechCrunch that 20 months after rolling out its AI product, the startup has added $70 million in new annualized recurring revenue (ARR), pushing its total company ARR to $100 million.
“Before generative AI, it was impossible for anyone without years of specialized design training to create polished, consumer-ready ad assets,” said Kashish Gupta, Hightouch’s co-CEO. The company is co-led by Tejas Manohar, a former engineering manager at Segment, the customer data platform acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020.
Hightouch’s approach, however, solves gaps that standard off-the-shelf AI models cannot address on their own. The startup notes that many brands first tested AI-generated ad creative using general foundation models — broad AI systems that power tools like chatbots, but lack any specific context about individual brands — only to find the final images and videos failed to meet “on-brand” quality and consistency standards.
“Foundation models don’t know the specific details of consumer brands, from their official brand colors and approved fonts to their unique tone and existing asset libraries,” Gupta said. “LLMs would even hallucinate products that don’t actually exist, and you can’t run ads or send marketing emails for products that don’t exist.”
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To lock in consistent on-brand output, Hightouch connects directly to its customers’ existing creative stacks, including popular design platform Figma, internal brand photo libraries, and third-party content management systems (CMS). By pulling data directly from these sources, the platform “learns” a company’s unique brand identity from the ground up. Hightouch’s custom AI agents then use these approved photos, designs, and customer insights to help marketers build personalized ad campaigns autonomously, no waiting for designer or developer input required.
Hightouch’s AI is built to create images and videos that match the quality of work from professional designers, avoiding the generic, “fake AI” look common to most generative AI output.
“For example, Domino’s AI will never generate a pizza from scratch,” Gupta explained. “It always uses existing approved images of pizza, and inserts that product into an ad where the background and other surrounding elements might be AI-generated for the campaign.”
Hightouch currently employs roughly 380 people, and reached a $1.2 billion valuation in February 2025 when it closed an $80 million Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.
Pictured above, left to right: Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta
Hightouch’s AI Ad Tool Cuts Out Design Teams, Hits $100M ARR For The Startup
