AI Hustle: News on Open AI, ChatGPT, Midjourney, NVIDIA, Anthropic, Open Source LLMs: Databricks Backs Hightouch's $38M Round for AI-Powered Marketing Data Activation

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If you've been following the podcast for a while, you'll know that over the last six

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Of the hundreds of projects I've covered, this is the one that I believe has the greatest

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So today I'm excited to announce AIBOX.

AIBOX is a no-code AI app building platform paired with the App Store for AI that lets

you monetize your AI tools.

The platform lets you build apps by linking together AI models like chatGPT, mid-journey

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so you can use AI to automate every function in your organization.

To get notified when we launch and be one of the first to build on the platform, you

can join the wait list at AIBOX.AI, the link is in the show notes.

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If you're an investor that is focused on disruptive tech, I'd love to tell you more

about the platform.

You can reach out to me at jaden at AIBOX.AI, I'll leave that email in the show notes.

I think this thing to say is that really in today's landscape companies have a ton of

data but the challenge for getting really meaningful insights is still a big obstacle.

I think that's where Databricks comes in.

You've seen Databricks.

They've made some big plays in this space.

They're definitely a major player in the AI arena.

They're based in San Francisco and they are trying to change that challenge that companies

are having with really getting good data out of there or I guess really getting good insights

out of their data.

They're known for pioneering the lake house architecture and Databricks aims to make data

monetization easier by democratizing access to insights.

That's what they say.

To be honest, I have an aversion to the word democratizing when it comes to, I don't know,

everyone's democratizing AI, democratizing, I could literally tag that word onto almost

all the companies I've ever worked on.

I think most people could in some way or another by making something easier.

They always say they're democratizing it.

Whatever.

Let me get over my aversion to that.

It is a really interesting play they're making.

To further their ambition here, Databricks Ventures, that's their venture arm that invests

and acquires companies, essentially their investment arm, they recently disclosed a strategic investment

in San Francisco Startup High Touch.

This announcement is part of a larger $38 million funding round and it aims to solve

the critical challenge businesses face to utilize their enormous data resources effectively.

The partnership between Databricks Robust Data Platform and High Touch's specialized

data extraction capabilities is set to really help businesses, particularly in marketing,

which as you know, I am all about marketing.

I studied marketing, I taught advanced digital marketing at university.

This is kind of my area that gets me excited.

So Steve Sobel, who kind of heads up communications, media and entertainment over at Databricks,

he clarified the essence of this collaboration.

He said, quote, what we're delivering with High Touch is all around making data usable.

The focus, he said, is on, quote, helping organizations through their enterprise data

challenges and strategy.

And really, I think he's kind of signaling Databricks' intent to be a vertical player.

So he's fluent in both the language of the customer and the industry at large.

And he kind of elaborated on all of this specifically on the contemporary business climate.

He said, we live in an area where every industry is moving towards direct to consumer, optimizing

marketing and delivering a superior personalized experience across any channel, anywhere, anytime

is essential.

So Koushish Gupta, whose High Touch's co-founder and CEO added a different layer to the narrative.

And he kind of introduced the, quote, broad booster, or the match booster feature.

So this is built into High Touch to harmonize first party data with third party data sets.

So according to Gupta, quote, this approach allows businesses to reach their customers

across a multitude of different channels.

He then kind of went on to describe how data and marketing strategies are increasingly becoming

one.

And he was even citing, you know, personalized factors like zip codes logged in times as key

elements influencing business decisions, which is really interesting, you know, kind

of breaking down if I'm going to buy something, right, what the likelihood of me buying based

off of like my zip code, or I think it's really interesting they like look at login time.

So they're like, man, like this guy logged into, I don't know, let's say I log into

Disney Plus to watch a movie at seven o'clock at night, then maybe I'm more likely in, you

know, one hour later to go and buy a new TV remote or a new, you know, popcorn bowl or

I don't know, whatever.

Right.

That's kind of a funny example.

But it's interesting.

They're taking into account data points that I think not a lot of people look at when you're

trying to make some of these predictive ads and other kind of marketing decisions.

So founded back in 2020 by Gupta, along with former segment engineers, Tia Monar and Josh

Curl, Hightouch aims to serve as a single source of truth by leveraging reverse ETL technology.

So the platform allows customers to sync data from their data warehouses to over 200 SaaS

tools, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Facebook, and TikTok without requiring engineering support.

So the company reports a threefold venture or revenue increase in the first half of 2022

and has grown from 40 employees in 2021 to 93 this year.

They have a really extensive client list featuring organizations like the NBA, Grammarly,

and PetSmart.

And the looking forward, the newly acquired funding, I think, is going to fuel product

development, particularly in customer understanding and machine learning.

So Hightouch also plans to ramp up its go to market strategies and broaden its talent

pool.

Gupta highlighted that the company's exponential growth has been customer driven.

So he really kind of underscored the strong product market fit, which if, you know, if

you've done startups, you know, it's all about product market fit.

If they're seeing strong product market fit, then it's, you know, definitely time to scale.

So as an enterprise increasingly, you know, rely on this data, the data warehouses as

their kind of foundational source of truth, I think Hightouch is positioned as kind of

a pioneer in this field that's growing really fast.

And it's, you know, the field of reverse ETL.

So setting data from Gartner, the adoption by AI Enterprise has grown 270% over the past

four years and tripled in the last year alone.

So, you know, it's, you know, we're seeing a massive surge right now, and I think this

really kind of aligns with increased demand for platforms like Hightouch and really platforms

that are capable of activating data and applying AI, which is, you know, thereby bringing or

kind of bridging the gap between data and abundance and, you know, actionable insights.

There's a lot of data out there, but like, what do we do about that?

And I think that's the problem a lot of enterprises are trying to solve, and I think that's a

problem that Hightouch is going to help deliver on.

So it's going to be interesting to follow this company and see how they scale.

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.