GoKawiilHistorically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online ad campaigns.
In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands such as Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design teams or ad agencies.
The offering has been highly successful. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), it tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR.
“Before Gen AI, it was impossible for someone without many, many years of design skills to create consumer-level assets,” said Kashish Gupta, Hightouch’s co-CEO. The company is also led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a former engineering manager at Segment, a customer data platform 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 attempted to generate ad campaigns using general foundational models — broad AI systems that power tools like chatbots but lack knowledge of specific brands — only to find the resulting images and videos failed to meet “on-brand” standards.
“Foundation models didn’t know about specific consumer brands, whether it was colors or fonts, tone, or assets,” Gupta says. “The LLMs would hallucinate products that didn’t exist, and you can’t do advertising and emails on products that don’t exist.”
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