Hightouch, founded in 2018 by Josh Curl, Kashish Gupta, and Tejas Manohar and launched out of Y Combinator's W19 batch, built the reverse ETL category: syncing customer data that already lives in a cloud warehouse like Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or Redshift back out into the marketing, sales, and advertising tools a team runs day to day, instead of duplicating that data into a separate customer data platform.
The founding insight came from co-founder Tejas Manohar's time at Segment, watching customers pay to get behavioral data into a warehouse and then need it pushed back out again, a gap reverse ETL was built to close. Hightouch has since layered audience building, identity resolution, and AI-driven decisioning on top of that same warehouse-native foundation, repositioning from a reverse ETL tool into what it now calls an agentic customer data platform, and a Sapphire Ventures-led $80 million Series D pushed the company to unicorn status at a $1.2 billion valuation.
Hightouch runs on custom enterprise pricing rather than published self-serve tiers, reflecting its focus on data teams syncing production-scale warehouse data rather than individual users. For a company whose customer data already sits in a modern warehouse and wants to activate it in existing tools without standing up a separate CDP, Hightouch's warehouse-native sync addresses that directly.
