Databricks Ventures has greenlit a strategic investment in Hightouch, a San Francisco–based startup that specializes in activating customer data. This move sits at the intersection of Databricks’ data platform and Hightouch’s data activation capabilities, marking a deliberate push to monetize data by turning raw analytics into actionable insights for marketing and customer experience. The investment is part of a broader funding round targeting the challenge many enterprises face: turning vast, diverse data stores into timely, usable intelligence. By combining Databricks’ robust data platform with Hightouch’s proven approach to data extraction and activation, the partnership aims to provide enterprises with the tools they need to fully leverage their data, especially in marketing contexts where speed and precision matter.
The broader objective behind the partnership is straightforward yet ambitious: to lower the barriers between data ownership and data action. Databricks, a prominent player in the data and AI space, has long touted the lakehouse concept as a unifying architecture that blends data warehousing, data lakes, and AI workloads. Hightouch, by contrast, centers on turning data housed in data warehouses into operational signals that can be sent directly to a wide array of business applications and channels. With Databricks Ventures investing in Hightouch, the aim is to create a tighter, more capable end-to-end flow from data collection and storage to data activation and measurement. This is designed to empower organizations to extract more value from their data resources without requiring heavy custom engineering for every activation scenario.
The strategic investment comes amid a larger $38 million funding round that concentrates on helping companies address a persistent challenge: how to harness the power of expansive data resources in a way that translates into real-world outcomes. The combined offering—Databricks’ data platform paired with Hightouch’s data extraction and activation tools—will reportedly give businesses the means to unlock the full potential of their data assets. The focus of this union is particularly relevant to marketing teams, where the ability to move data quickly, ethically, and accurately into operational tools determines the quality and impact of customer engagement efforts. In practical terms, the partnership envisions a smoother path from data collection and storage to activation across multiple channels, enabling marketers to deliver more personalized, timely experiences without compromising on governance or speed.
Steve Sobel, who leads communications, media, and entertainment at Databricks, described the essence of the partnership in an interview. He emphasized that the collaboration is fundamentally about making data usable. The core value proposition, he explained, is to help organizations address their enterprise data challenges and strategic ambitions more effectively. Sobel’s framing highlights a deliberate shift in Databricks’ strategy: rather than positioning purely as a data analytics platform, the company aims to speak the language of industry verticals and directly address the operational needs of customers. The emphasis on usability and practical data challenges underscores a broader industry trend toward closer alignment between data infrastructure and business outcomes. In Sobel’s view, we are living in an era where every industry is moving toward direct-to-consumer models, and the ability to optimize marketing and deliver personalized experiences across channels—anywhere, anytime—is essential for maintaining competitive differentiation.
The partnership centers on syncing customer data across systems, with Hightouch’s cofounder and co-CEO offering a complementary perspective that helps illuminate the daily impact of the collaboration. The concept at the heart of Hightouch’s value proposition is the “match booster,” a feature designed to harmonize first-party data with third-party datasets. This capability enables businesses to reach customers across a wide range of channels, from email and CRM systems to social platforms and advertising networks. The strategic rationale here is not only about data delivery but also about data quality, enrichment, and the ability to coordinate messaging across several touchpoints. In this sense, the partnership is positioned as a critical step toward a more integrated approach to customer engagement, where data strategy and marketing strategy converge into a single, cohesive discipline.
Kashish Gupta, Hightouch’s cofounder and co-CEO, provided further insight into how the platform operates in practice. Gupta described the match booster as a pivotal component that integrates first-party data with external datasets, enabling a consistent, cross-channel reach. This cross-channel capability ensures that messages and experiences can be tailored to individual customers across multiple channels—not merely through a single point of contact but through a synchronized set of interactions. Gupta noted that as the business world has shifted toward more personalized experiences, the convergence of data strategy and marketing strategy has become nearly inseparable. Personalization now hinges on a broad array of signals—zip code, last login time, and a host of other activities—that collectively steer marketing decisions. He argues that the current business landscape demands an integrated approach to data and marketing, where insights must translate quickly into action.
Gupta further explained that the surge in digital data is reshaping how companies think about value extraction. The abundance of data created by digital transformation offers vast opportunities, but turning that data into meaningful marketing improvements requires effective data activation. The partnership’s core promise, Gupta suggested, is to deliver a strategy that does not merely collect data but uses it to optimize marketing outcomes. This involves harnessing data to inform targeting, messaging, channel choice, and timing, as well as measuring the downstream impact on engagement and revenue. In short, the collaboration is framed as a practical blueprint for turning raw data into competitive advantage, particularly in marketing where the speed and relevance of insights have a direct bearing on business results.
Overview of Hightouch’s Growth and Market Position
Founded in 2020 by Gupta, a former Bessemer Venture Partners investor, along with Tejas Manohar and Josh Curl, both former engineers at Segment, Hightouch has positioned itself as a leading innovator in the reverse ETL space. The company’s core value proposition hinges on enabling data teams and business units to transform their data warehouse into a single source of truth that fuels action across a broad ecosystem of tools. By leveraging reverse ETL, Hightouch makes it possible to move data from the warehouse to more than 200 SaaS applications, including popular platforms used by sales, marketing, customer success, and advertising teams. This capability is particularly valuable for organizations seeking to operationalize analytics and ensure consistency of data across tools.
Hightouch reports a broad and diverse customer base spanning multiple verticals and industries. Notable clients include high-profile organizations across sports, education, retail, and finance, which underscores the platform’s appeal across sectors where customer data and rapid activation matter. The company asserts robust growth in its top line, noting that revenue more than tripled in the first half of a recent year, illustrating a rapid trajectory fueled by product-market fit and rising demand for data activation capabilities. In addition to revenue growth, Hightouch has expanded its team significantly, increasing headcount from about 40 in the prior year to more than 90 in the current year. This expansion supports increased product development, sales and marketing efforts, and the onboarding of new talent to sustain momentum.
The upcoming funding round is earmarked for accelerating product development in ways that deepen customer understanding and support the development of ready-to-use, out-of-the-box machine learning models. Gupta indicated that the company plans to invest in product features that make it easier for customers to harness AI capabilities without requiring extensive custom engineering. This emphasis on prebuilt ML models aligns with a broader industry push to democratize AI—making advanced capabilities accessible to a wider range of users and teams within a company. Alongside product development, Hightouch intends to scale its go-to-market efforts and recruit top talent across multiple functions, reflecting a strategic emphasis on growth, customer success, and continued innovation.
The rapid growth narrative around Hightouch is framed in part by the broader dynamics of the reverse ETL market, an area that is gaining traction as more enterprises adopt data warehouses as their primary source of truth. Hightouch has positioned itself as a pioneer in this category, with a focus on enabling data activation across business teams without requiring specialized engineering resources. According to market observers, the rapid expansion of AI and data usage has contributed to heightened demand for platforms that help enterprises operationalize data inside their marketing and customer-facing workflows. The company’s experience—growing revenue and staffing in a short period—serves as a testament to the relevance of its product and the market’s readiness for more integrated data activation solutions.
Strategic Use of Funds: Product, GTM, and Talent
The new capital will be allocated toward several strategic priorities that are central to Hightouch’s growth plan. First and foremost is product development, with a focus on deepening customer understanding and delivering enhanced, out-of-the-box machine learning capabilities. The goal is to reduce the time between data activation needs and actionable outputs, enabling business teams to deploy and iterate more rapidly in response to changing market conditions and consumer behavior. This investment is also expected to accelerate the breadth of Hightouch’s ML-driven features, broadening the spectrum of predictive and prescriptive capabilities that can be harnessed within marketing, sales, and customer service workflows.
Second, the funds will be directed toward scaling go-to-market activities. This involves expanding sales capacity, refining partner ecosystems, and broadening market reach to attract new customers and verticals. A larger GTM footprint will support faster adoption of the platform across enterprise accounts, helping organizations realize the benefits of data activation at scale. The expansion is also likely to include enhancements to customer success and enablement programs, ensuring organizations can realize ongoing value from their investment while navigating the complexities of implementing data activation across diverse teams and tools.
Third, Hightouch plans to recruit more talent across all functions. In a market where demand for skilled data engineers, machine learning experts, and go-to-market professionals remains high, the ability to attract top-tier talent will be crucial to sustaining product excellence and growth. By investing in human capital, Hightouch aims to accelerate product iterations, improve user experiences, and strengthen its market positioning against peers competing for the same pool of skilled talent.
The company’s leadership attributes its rapid growth to strong customer demand and a clear product-market fit. Gupta notes that the company’s overarching vision is to democratize data for all business teams, enabling them to leverage data from their data warehouse without the need for code or engineering resources. This democratization aligns with the broader movement in the data and AI space toward reducing friction and enabling non-technical users to participate meaningfully in data-driven decision making. As Hightouch continues to ride this wave, the partnership with Databricks Ventures serves as a strategic accelerant, bridging the gap between data infrastructure and data activation and signaling a broader industry trend toward seamless data-to-action pipelines.
The broader market context is important here. The reverse ETL category is gaining traction as more companies embrace data warehouses as their truth source and seek ways to operationalize data in real time. Market researchers have observed rising adoption of AI across organizations, with AI deployment expanding in phases across functions and use cases. This has created a virtuous cycle where data warehouses become the central hub for feeding AI systems, analytics, and business applications that drive decision making. In this environment, Hightouch’s approach to data activation—moving data from warehouse to a wide variety of tools—addresses a core requirement: turning analytics into actionable, measurable outcomes across the organization. The strategic investment from Databricks Ventures reinforces the belief that robust data platforms paired with activation capabilities can unlock new levels of efficiency, personalization, and business value.
Future Outlook: Data Activation as a Core Enterprise Capability
The Databricks–Hightouch collaboration signals an ongoing shift in how enterprises think about data architecture and go-to-market strategies. Rather than treating data platforms and marketing tools as separate layers, this partnership envisions an integrated stack in which data storage, processing, governance, and activation are tightly coupled to drive tangible business results. As enterprises accumulate more data from diverse sources—web analytics, CRM systems, transactional databases, and third-party datasets—the ability to activate that data in a scalable, compliant, and cost-effective manner becomes a strategic differentiator. The convergence of data strategy and marketing strategy that Gupta highlighted emphasizes a future in which data-driven decision making is embedded in everyday workflows, enabling teams to respond rapidly to new insights and customer behaviors.
From a product perspective, the collaboration could push the development of more plug-and-play data activation capabilities that require minimal engineering overhead for deployment across departments. For marketing teams, this means more precise audience targeting, more relevant content, and better alignment across channels, ultimately leading to improved engagement and conversion rates. For data teams, the partnership promises improved governance, traceability, and control—features that are essential when dealing with regulated industries or privacy-sensitive data. The emphasis on enabling non-engineers to use data through intuitive interfaces and prebuilt ML models aligns with broader industry efforts to empower business units to be self-sufficient in data-driven decision making while maintaining strong governance and oversight.
In the broader landscape, the rise of lakehouse architectures and unified data ecosystems is expected to continue accelerating. The lakehouse approach, which seeks to combine the strengths of data lakes and data warehouses, provides a scalable, flexible foundation for AI workloads and analytics. By linking lakehouse capabilities with data activation platforms, enterprises can streamline their data-to-insight-to-action workflows, reducing latency and enabling more agile experimentation. The strategic investment in Hightouch by Databricks Ventures is a clear signal of confidence in this integrated approach, and it may encourage other players in the data space to pursue complementary activation strategies that align with the needs of enterprise marketing, customer experience, and growth teams.
Conclusion
The strategic investment by Databricks Ventures in Hightouch marks a notable moment in the evolution of data ecosystems. It represents a deliberate attempt to bridge the gap between data infrastructure and data activation, with a specific emphasis on marketing and customer engagement. By combining Databricks’ lakehouse-powered data platform with Hightouch’s robust reverse ETL capabilities, the partnership seeks to unlock greater value from vast data resources, enabling faster, more precise activation across channels. For enterprises, this partnership promises a more seamless, scalable, and governance-conscious approach to turning analytics into action—empowering marketing teams to deliver personalized experiences, optimizing campaigns, and driving measurable return on investment.
As the data landscape continues to evolve, the integration of data storage, processing, and activation appears to be a central pathway toward achieving broader AI-enabled capabilities in business. The Databricks–Hightouch alliance embodies this trajectory, highlighting the industry’s move toward end-to-end data ecosystems that empower organizations to monetize data through meaningful, timely, and responsible insights. In a market where the demand for data-driven decision making grows louder each day, the partnership offers a concrete blueprint for turning theory into practice and setting new standards for how enterprises harness the power of data to inform strategy, optimize operations, and achieve sustainable growth.