Historically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online advertising campaigns.
End of 2024, seven-year-old startup High touch has launched an AI-powered service that lets marketers create personalized content for brands like Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart and Spotify without involving brand design teams or ad agencies.
The offer was a great success. Since launching its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), he told TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR.
“Before GenAI, it was impossible for someone without many, 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, former head of engineering 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 many brands initially attempted to generate ad campaigns using general foundational models – large AI systems that power tools like chatbots but lack knowledge about specific brands – only to discover that the resulting images and videos did not meet “on brand” standards.
“Foundation models were unfamiliar with specific consumer brands, whether it was colors, fonts, tones or assets,” says Gupta. “LLMs would hallucinate products that don’t exist, and you can’t advertise or email 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 Figma design platform, photo libraries and content management systems (CMS).
Drawing on these sources, the platform “learns” a company’s specific brand identity. Hightouch’s AI agents then use these photos, designs and customer information to help marketers create personalized ad campaigns autonomously, without having to wait for designers or developers.
The goal of Hightouch AI is to create images and videos that look like they were created by professional designers, avoiding the “fake” or generic look often associated with AI.
“For example, Domino’s will never produce pizza,” Gupta says. “They will still use existing pizza images and place them in an ad where the background can be generated, and other elements can be generated around it.”
The company, which now employs around 380 people, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025 when it raised a $80 million, Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.
Pictured above, left to right: Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl and Kashish Gupta
Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Before joining TechCrunch, she wrote about venture capital for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned her CFA designation.
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