Traditionally, entrepreneurs relied on designers and different inventive professionals to develop pictures and movies for personalised on-line advert campaigns.
In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that enables advertising professionals to create customized content material for manufacturers comparable to Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify with out involving model design groups or advert businesses.
The providing has been extremely profitable. Since introducing its AI product 20 months in the past, Hightouch has added $70 million in annualized recurring income (ARR), it tells Trendster, bringing the startup to a complete of $100 million in ARR.
“Earlier than GenAI, it was unattainable for somebody with out many, a few years of design abilities to create consumer-level property,” stated Kashish Gupta, Hightouch’s co-CEO. The corporate can also be led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a former engineering supervisor at Phase, a buyer knowledge platform acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020.
Nevertheless, Hightouch’s strategy goes past what commonplace AI fashions can do on their very own.
Hightouch says that many manufacturers initially tried to generate advert campaigns utilizing basic foundational fashions — broad AI programs that energy instruments like chatbots however lack information of particular manufacturers — solely to search out the ensuing pictures and movies failed to satisfy “on-brand” requirements.
“Basis fashions didn’t find out about particular shopper manufacturers, whether or not it was colours or fonts, tone, or property,” Gupta says. “The LLMs would hallucinate merchandise that didn’t exist, and you may’t do promoting and emails on merchandise that don’t exist.”
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To make sure model consistency, Hightouch connects on to its clients’ present inventive instruments, comparable to the favored design platform Figma, picture libraries, and content material administration programs (CMS).
By pulling from these sources, the platform “learns” an organization’s particular model id. Hightouch’s AI brokers then use these images, designs, and buyer insights to assist entrepreneurs construct personalised advert campaigns autonomously, with out having to attend on designers or builders.
The aim of Hightouch’s AI is to create pictures and movies that appear like they had been made by skilled designers, avoiding the “faux” or generic look usually related to AI.
“For instance, Domino’s won’t ever generate a pizza,” Gupta says. “They’ll at all times use present pictures of pizza, and so they’ll place it into an advert the place the background is perhaps generated, and different issues is perhaps generated round it.”
The corporate, which now employs roughly 380 folks, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025 when it raised an $80 million Sequence C funding spherical led by Sapphire Ventures.
Pictured above, left to proper: Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta
