Customer data startup Hightouch grabs third funding round in 12 months

Just under a year after Hightouch, a SaaS service that helps businesses sync their customer data across sales and marketing tools, made its public launch, the company is back with its third fundraise.

The $40 million Series B round was led by ICONIQ Growth, which was joined by existing investors Amplify Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Y Combinator and Afore Capital. Angel investors participating in this round include Ramp founder Gene Lee, Monte Carlo founder Barr Moses, Airflow creator Maxime Beauchemin and The Chainsmokers’ Alex Pall.

The latest investment comes four months after $12.1 million in Series A financing led by Amplify, and gives Hightouch $54.2 million in total fundraising and a post-money valuation of $450 million.

Hightouch was co-founded by Kashish Gupta, Josh Curl and Tejas Manohar to democratize data so that anyone can use data without needing to rely on an engineering team. It released its first product, Reverse ETL, to access data, previously only in dashboards, into day-to-day tools like customer relationship management.

Since the launch, the company has focused on enterprise customers and added access control features and rewrote its entire platform to handle the millions of rows of data that Fortune 500 customers send on a daily basis, Gupta said via email.

In addition to a partnership with Snowflake to warehouse data and the release of Hightouch Audiences, which enables the user to define what data goes into their tools, recent milestones include amassing hundreds of customers, going from four to 40 employees and increasing revenue three times.

It was the accelerated inbound attention that had investors reaching out to both the company and its customers, though Hightouch was not fundraising, Gupta said.

“Given the stellar customer references, product market fit, market tailwinds and team we had assembled, multiple VCs wanted to pre-empt the round though we had a lot of money still left in the bank,” he added. “Ultimately, we found a firm we really loved, ICONIQ, and a price that justified raising sooner rather than later, so we went for it, but had we not found the right partner, we would not have needed to raise money.”

The company plans to invest its new funds into getting Reverse ETL into more hands and expects to double the number of employees by next year. It will also put more focus into the core developer experience of the product and making it more accessible to different verticals, starting with marketers and moving into sales, customer success and support.

Meanwhile, Gupta considers the modern data stack — the software stack for data tooling — to be nascent compared with its more mature developer tooling counterpart. Companies in this space “are receiving incredibly high multiples compared to normal SaaS counterparts because VCs are betting on the future growth of the market rather than just the growth of existing companies within the market,” he said.

“Data is a company’s competitive advantage and companies no longer want to keep their data trapped in business information tools or in third-party vendors like CRMs and CDPs,” Gupta added. “They want to own and analyze their data in a single place and use that data in their business tools to personalize day-to-day customer interactions. The overall trend is an unbundling of the data and marketing stacks, as companies prefer to pick the best solution for each task instead of an all-in-one but master-of-none solution.”