Historically, marketers have relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for custom online advertising campaigns.
In late 2024, seven-year-old startup Hightouch launched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands like Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design teams or ad agencies.
The show was a huge success. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), according to TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
“Before Gen AI, it was impossible for someone without many years of design skills to create consumer-level assets,” said Kashish Gupta, co-CEO of Hightouch. The company is also led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a former engineering director at Segment, the customer data platform that Twilio acquired for $3.2 billion in 2020.
However, Hightouch’s approach goes beyond what standard AI models can do on their own.
Hightouch says many brands initially tried to create ad campaigns using generic foundational models — broad AI systems that power tools like chatbots but lacked knowledge of specific brands — only to find that the resulting images and videos failed to meet “on-brand” standards.
“Establishment models were not aware of specific consumer brands, be it colours, lines, tones or origins,” says Gupta. “LLMs will hallucinate products that don’t exist, and you can’t do ads and emails on products that don’t exist.”
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To ensure brand consistency, Hightouch connects directly to its clients’ existing creative tools, such as the popular design platform Figma, image libraries, and content management systems (CMS).
By drawing on these sources, the platform “learns” the company’s specific brand identity. Hightouch’s AI agents then use these images, designs, and customer insights to help marketers create personalized ad campaigns autonomously, without having to wait on designers or developers.
The goal of Hightouch’s AI is to create photos and videos that look like they were made by professional designers, avoiding the “fake” or generic look often associated with AI.
“Domino’s, for example, will never produce pizza,” Gupta says. “They will always use existing images of pizza, and they will put it in an ad where the background can be created, and other things can be created around it.”
The company, which now employs approximately 380 people, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025 when it raised an $80 million Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.
Pictured above, from left to right: Tejas Manohar and Kashish Gupta
