founder of hightouch.com, past lives in ML @penn and VC @bessemervp, ATL ➡️ PHL ➡️ SF, I love helping other founders and giving honest advice - DMs open!
San Francisco, CA
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Pinned Tweet
if you're not using your privilege to help other people then what's the point of even having it?
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kashish retweeted
Why is AI in marketing so far behind coding?
@kashgupta_, founder of Hightouch, thinks most "AI for marketing" has been way too lazy.
In this episode of Navigators, we dug into why sloppy teams are ruining the perception of AI marketing tools, why context engineering is so important, and what it actually takes to make AI a first-class actor in a marketing org:
2:41 Why content is the bottleneck, and why hallucination made it worse
4:32 The brand context layer: teaching LLMs your visual language through embeddings
5:09 Why Hightouch uses a coding loop on SVG, not an image generator
14:41 Going from 20% hallucination to 1% in weeks, not months
16:04 Why "bring your own database" won enterprise 18:36 The vision: five agent-generated marketing opportunities every morning
24:18 "Thickness vs thinness": what makes a real moat in marketing AI
25:52 Teams of 1-5 engineers with no PM shipping billion-dollar products
34:31 The next inflection point for AI marketing
Checkout Navigators, our pod on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
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Does anyone have an Instinct invite? Im on openclaw rn but it looks like i need to upgrade
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hey @bankrbot claim fees for 0x239cf99329ed442f00a482c63bdf89eccbef8ba3
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kashish retweeted
Exclusive: Investors are confident that AI software will change marketing. A new Goldman Sachs-led funding round values one startup at $2.75 billion. on.wsj.com/4tRznik
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kashish retweeted
Congrats to @HightouchData on their $150M Series D at a $2.75B valuation!
Hightouch is building AI agents for marketers, so teams can spend less time navigating approvals and toggling between platforms. They've grown revenue by more than 100% in each of the past two years, and the company surpassed $100M in ARR this year.
wsj.com/cmo-today/goldman-sa…
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So proud to announce that @HightouchData has raised a 150M Series D, led by @GoldmanSachs and @BainCapVC, valuing the company at $2.75B!
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Let's normalize reporting MRR for companies where there is no annual commitment. 12x MRR is not ARR
A bunch of people are starting to dunk on this as if us releasing this were bad. If you're 18 and a brilliant engineer, you aren't born with this. This is 101, basic knowledge.
And is it complicated? Yes Accounting you could spend a lifetime learning! Hard to distill to 1 page.
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kashish retweeted
Kashish Gupta GEN18 W18's @HightouchData is a smart solution for companies looking to streamline marketing efforts. The company's personalized AI-powered emails have caught the attention of clients such as @Spotify and @PetSmart. whr.tn/4cowKin
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kashish retweeted
.@HightouchData launched an AI ad creation tool 20 months ago and has added $70M in ARR since, bringing them to $100M total. Brands like Domino's, Spotify, PetSmart, and Chime use it to build personalized campaigns without design teams or agencies.
techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/hi…
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kashish retweeted
Congrats @HightouchData team for the successful entry into the AI marketing space. Excellent example of how to build a compound startup starting with a single product. 🚀
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kashish retweeted
Content (!!) in Hightouch is happening. I'm really pumped about this new feature 🔥
The core idea is something we call "content assembly"
Ask for a campaign and we’ll make it using all your existing creative across your tools like Figma, Adobe, Dropbox, etc.
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I relate to this haha
Turns out with claude code, my decades long strategy of NOT deeply learning:
- regexs
- sql
- nginx confs
- elaborate shell commands
- advanced shell scripting
- any javascript framework
- perf optimization
- webpack, cdns, bundlers
- 1000 other things
...was entirely correct.
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If you work at a company that's not absolutely pumped about Sonnet 5...leave
only 2 types of companies in the world - the ones where the product gets better with every new model. And the ones that will not be around much longer
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100p agree
Lunch w/ an exited founder who helps fortune 500 companies adopt AI.
Insane reality check:
Some of the biggest companies on earth use *zero* AI tools.
Not even ChatGPT.
Execs only recognize: ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini (maybe Perplexity).
Everyone feels behind.
Nobody knows what to buy or how to plug it in.
The "AI saturation" narrative is another example of what a bubble Silicon Valley is.
Rest of the world hasn’t started yet.
We have to build for the 99%.
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Hightouch is doing this for b2c companies :)
Someone needs to build a company around Customer Context Graph.
Collect all the threads – emails, meeting transcripts, slack messages, contracts, deliverables, detail, info, and config – from your customers into context that can be explored and queried by agents.
This info is scattered between CRMs, ticketing systems, note takers, product, landing pages – it's inherently cross platform information. You need a new solution. Kind of how Segment did it trad SaaS apps.
With this context, you can fire up Claude Cowork or similar for ad-hoc work or build extremely powerful agent automation flows. Expose the context as skills, MCP, and file system.
Even better if you build it as open-source with a hosted option so people can take it on-prem as needed. Create a connector ecosystem around it. This will power every single next-gen AI-native full-stack business.
Sort of like the context graph (@ashugarg @JayaGup10 ) that has been discussed recently but I'm thinking something very concrete: "Get me all the context about this particular customer."
A customer-level, cross-system context substrate that agents can explore and act on
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kashish retweeted
What gives an AI company its edge? Founders in our community say it’s about more than just the model, it’s the context, focus, and foundations that really make the difference.
@kashgupta_, co-founder and co-CEO of @HightouchData, puts context at the center. He believes for AI to act intelligently, it needs data on how customers make decisions, and systems that can bring that context into play at the right moment.
Alexis Lê-Quôc, co-founder and CTO of @datadoghq, points to what he believes to be two essentials: the right data and the right “notation”: how problems are framed and expressed. When aligned, they unlock AI’s full potential.
@matanSF, co-founder and CEO of @FactoryAI, sees focus as the quiet superpower. In a world of limitless tools, he believes the edge comes from knowing what not to do.
@drinkzima, co-founder and CEO of @omni, underscores the importance of proprietary data. Colin believes the strongest AI products are built on unique workflows no model provider can replicate.
Hear more from founders across our community: bit.ly/44CgplA
Disclaimer: bit.ly/3H4dQj0
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kashish retweeted
What gives an AI company its edge? Founders in our community say it’s about more than just the model, it’s the context, focus, and foundations that really make the difference.
Alexis Lê-Quôc, co-founder and CTO of @datadoghq, points to a more elusive challenge: understanding the real value of AI. As agents improve, he asks: how do we measure what they're truly worth?
@EleonoreCRESPO, co-founder and co-CEO of @PigmentAI, sees a potential revolution in decision-making through real-time, agent-to-agent collaboration, where specialized agents connect siloed data, analyze shifts, and act on insights across finance, supply chain, and beyond.
@matanSF, co-founder and CEO of @FactoryAI, is preparing for a behavior shift in engineering. As AI agents take on more of the coding, developers may move from writing code to managing and guiding it.
@kashgupta_ , co-founder and co-CEO of @HightouchData, is bridging the gap between data and activation, so companies can use AI not just to understand customers, but to serve them in real time.
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kashish retweeted
Why can’t marketing AI help marketers the way coding AI helps software engineers? @HightouchData thinks it can.
They just launched Hightouch Agents, an AI platform purpose-built for marketers.
It combines full marketing context with pre-built marketing skills, giving marketers the same productivity boost that coding assistants gave engineers.
hightouch.com/blog/hightouch…
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