Historically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online advertising campaigns.
At the end of 2024, a seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that lets marketers create custom content for brands like Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart and Spotify without involving brand design teams or advertising agencies.
The promotion was extremely successful. Since launching its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), he tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR.
“Before GenAI, it was impossible for someone without many, many years of design skills to create consumer-grade assets,” said Kashish Gupta, co-CEO of Hightouch. The company is also led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, formerly director of engineering at Segment, a customer data platform that was acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020.
However, Hightouch’s approach goes beyond what standard AI models can do on their own.
Hightouch says that many brands initially tried to create ad campaigns using generic foundational models – broad AI systems that power tools like chatbots but don’t know specific brands – only to find that the resulting images and videos didn’t meet “on-brand” standards.
“The institutional models didn’t know about specific consumer brands, whether it was colors or fonts, tone or elements,” says Gupta. “LLMs would be hallucinating about products that didn’t exist, and you can’t advertise and email products that don’t exist.”
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To ensure brand consistency, Hightouch connects directly to its clients’ existing creative tools, such as the popular design platform Figma, photo libraries and content management systems (CMS).
Drawing from these sources, the platform “learns” a company’s specific brand identity. Hightouch’s AI agents then use these photos, drawings and customer information to help marketers create personalized advertising campaigns autonomously, without having to wait for designers or developers.
Hightouch’s AI aims to create images and videos that look like they were created by professional designers, avoiding the “fake” or generic look often associated with artificial intelligence.
“For example, Domino’s will never create a pizza,” says Gupta. “They’ll always use existing pizza images and put them in an ad where the background can be created and other things can be created around it.”
The company, which now employs about 380 people, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025 when it raised an $80 million Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.
Pictured above, left to right: Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl and Kashish Gupta
