Hightouch: Revolutionizing Personalized Marketing With The First Agentic Marketer

Hightouch recently raised $80M in Series C funding at a $1.2B valuation to bring AI Decisioning to marketers. While marketers have long struggled to send the right message at the right time, Hightouch has created a solution that uses AI agents to deliver personalized experiences across multiple channels, like email, push notifications, and ads. Their AI agents optimize each customer’s journey, automatically running experiments and providing insights into what works for different groups of customers. Today, they serve leading brands like Autotrader, Spotify, Cars.com, Grammarly, and PetSmart. YC Partner Gustaf Alstromer recently sat down with the Hightouch founders to talk about how they got here, their founding story, and the kind of company they are building. Learn more about Hightouch at https://hightouch.com. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:55 - AI marketer 03:10 - Reverse ETL 06:06 - Self-service 08:48 - Agentic marketer 11:08 - Hiring 13:30 - Promotions 16:40 - Handling stress. 19:34 - Low-profile

Gustaf Alströmerhost

May 8, 202520mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: May 8, 2025
Duration: 20m
Channel: YC Root Access
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Hightouch recently raised $80M in Series C funding at a $1.2B valuation to bring AI Decisioning to marketers. While marketers have long struggled to send the right message at the right time, Hightouch has created a solution that uses AI agents to deliver personalized experiences across multiple channels, like email, push notifications, and ads. Their AI agents optimize each customer’s journey, automatically running experiments and providing insights into what works for different groups of customers. Today, they serve leading brands like Autotrader, Spotify, Cars.com, Grammarly, and PetSmart. YC Partner Gustaf Alstromer recently sat down with the Hightouch founders to talk about how they got here, their founding story, and the kind of company they are building. Learn more about Hightouch at https://hightouch.com. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 00:55 - AI marketer 03:10 - Reverse ETL 06:06 - Self-service 08:48 - Agentic marketer 11:08 - Hiring 13:30 - Promotions 16:40 - Handling stress. 19:34 - Low-profile

SPEAKERS

Gustaf Alströmer
host
Y Combinator partner and former Airbnb product leader who interviews startup founders on YC Root Access.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of YC Root Access, featuring Gustaf Alströmer, Hightouch: Revolutionizing Personalized Marketing With The First Agentic Marketer explores hightouch’s evolution from reverse ETL to an agentic marketer platform Hightouch’s current product vision is “outcome-driven marketing,” where marketers set a goal and an AI agent uses a customer’s full history to generate propensities and personalize campaigns at scale.

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