For years, marketers depended on creative professionals—designers, video editors, branding experts. If you wanted a sharp ad campaign tailored for a brand, you needed a specialized team, and there was no shortcut around it. That world shifted in late 2024, when a relatively young company called Hightouch unveiled a tool that, frankly, rewired the process.
Instead of wrangling designers or chasing down ad agency timelines, marketing teams at companies like Domino’s, PetSmart, Spotify, and Chime could suddenly create bespoke ad materials in-house. Hightouch’s service, powered by its own flavor of artificial intelligence, gave them the reins—quickly, and without the old bottlenecks.
Nearly overnight, the platform became indispensable. Hightouch had launched its generative AI tool barely twenty months before reporting that it had grown its annual recurring revenue by $70 million, rocketing their total to $100 million. For a startup, these numbers are rare air.
Kashish Gupta, one of the company’s co-CEOs, doesn’t mince words about the landscape before generative AI hit the scene. “There was no way someone without deep design experience could make ad assets at a level consumers expect,” he says. Gupta and his co-leader, Tejas Manohar—a former engineering manager at Segment—built Hightouch to upend that limitation.
But their approach cuts deeper than simply giving users access to a generic AI. There’s a reason Hightouch caught fire while other AI marketing products trailed behind. At first, many brands tried using “foundation” AI models to generate campaign visuals. The results? Largely disappointing, sometimes almost comical. The AI might produce off-brand colors, use bizarre fonts, or even invent products out of thin air. Not exactly what a national pizza chain wants to see splashed across an ad.
“A general-purpose AI doesn’t grasp your logo, your color palette, your voice,” Gupta explains. “Worse still, it’ll sometimes conjure up offerings you didn’t even make.” There’s no way to market a product you never invented, after all.
So Hightouch charted a more nuanced course. They built their AI to plug straight into a brand’s creative backbone: Figma files, photo archives, content management systems—any repository where real assets live. Pulling from these sources, the AI isn’t just guessing what a brand “might” look like; it’s learning at the source, adapting to authentic guidelines.
When a marketer at Domino’s sets out to build a new online campaign, Hightouch’s AI draws on a bank of genuine pizza photos—never generating cheap replicas. It might produce a fresh background or suggest new visual elements, but the hero image is always pulled from Domino’s own gallery. The result? Ads that look handcrafted, unmistakably “on brand,” and never uncanny in the way so much AI content can be.
These subtle moves matter. Hightouch isn’t selling the illusion of creativity—it’s offering a shortcut to the real thing. Marketing teams move faster; they’re not waiting two weeks for a new batch of assets because design is already baked in. This kind of pragmatism caught the eye of deep-pocketed investors; when Hightouch closed its Series C in early 2025, the startup was priced at $1.2 billion. Its headcount swelled to nearly 400.
It’s not purely about technology. The founders understand that brand identity is sacred—and the trust they’ve earned from clientele comes from this careful attention to detail. The AI does the heavy lifting, but the creative voice remains true.
Where most generative models stumble, Hightouch steps lightly. No pizza topped with unrecognizable ingredients. No churning out emails advertising sci-fi menu items. Just sharp, agile content, built on a real foundation.
As the marketing world catches up to what’s possible, Hightouch stands as proof: sometimes, the best creative work happens not in spite of machines, but because someone finally taught the machines to listen.
