Hightouch Ushers In The Era Of Operational Analytics Posted on : Mar 04 - 2021

From small startups to big tech companies, each corporation now builds its culture and strategy around data. The rise of the data scientist’s role within a technology firm reflects the necessity to have data-driven decision-making as the standard. However, it’s not enough for a company’s data scientists to store and analyze the information stored in a typical data warehouse. That data needs to be delivered and ingested into sales, marketing, and support teams’ tools for firms to adapt to evolving customer behavior in real-time.

Unfortunately, building the key integrations with these tools requires significant engineering labor, which takes away from higher-priority, revenue-generating tasks. Kashish Gupta, Josh Curl and Tejas Manohar have built Hightouch.io to address this unmet need. Hightouch.io allows users to effortlessly sync data from their data warehouse to their customer-facing teams’ tools. The startup is based in San Francisco and has raised venture funding (which includes a large undisclosed round) from Calvin French-Owen (cofounder of Segment), Y Combinator, Afore Capital, Mathilde Colin (Front CEO), Olivier Pomer (Datadog CEO), Fareed Mosavat, Slack Fund, Leo Polovets, Brianne Kimmel, Allison Pickens, Todd/Rahul Vohra (cofounders of Superhuman), Ryan Carlson (CMO of Okta), Matt Sornson (Clearbit CEO), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO) and others.

Calvin French-Owen, cofounder of Segment (acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion) and an angel investor in Hightouch, says, “I invested in Hightouch because I believe in the founders and the opportunity. They are former Segment folks and have a great perspective on the data space as a whole. I think we’re going to see more and more tools built around the data warehouse ecosystem over the next few years. Hightouch fills the key gap of taking action on the data in the warehouse.”

Business-oriented groups within a company, such as sales and marketing, rely on customer data to rapidly adapt their selling and outreach strategies for current and future customers. However, these teams lack the engineering resources to sync data from the company’s data warehouse to their internal tools. Usually, they must request an engineer’s help to build a pipeline from the database to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool, which can take anywhere from weeks to months. The engineer’s time spent on this task slows down developing other value-added features to a company’s existing products or services. More importantly, these hacked-together-solutions from the engineer are not robust, flexible and secure enough to account for future functionality that a business-oriented team may need. The absence of a service enabling sales and marketing organizations to connect their internal tools to the data warehouses on their own implies the presence of a large market.

Gupta explains, “Traditionally, work done by the BI or Analytics teams ends up in reports and dashboards like Looker or Tableau. Operational Analytics gives companies the ability to use this analysis to power operational workflows and inform business decisions during the fact, rather than analyze the results after the fact. The idea is to take action on data.” View More