$100M/year Segment for marketers
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: Founded by ex-Segment engineers as a reverse ETL tool for syncing warehouse data into CRMs and ad platforms, Hightouch escaped the collapse of its category by converting itself into a “composable CDP” for marketers. Sacra estimates Hightouch hit $100M in ARR in April 2026, up from $85M at the end of 2025 (+143% YoY). For more, check out our full report and dataset on Hightouch.
Key points via Sacra AI:
- The emergence of Amazon Redshift & the cloud data warehouse in 2012 drove massive demand pull for tools that could pipe data into it, throwing tailwinds behind Segment (2011) & the customer data platform (“CDP”) and Fivetran (2012) & extract-load-transform (“ELT”), inspiring a team including two ex-Segment engineers to launch Hightouch (2018) to move data in the opposite direction (“reverse ETL”), out of the warehouse back into the SaaS tools like Salesforce, Braze & Zendesk where marketers & salespeople work. The data warehouse as the source of truth gave rise to a massive unbundling cycle known as “the modern data stack” of composable tools built on top of the data warehouse (Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks) including Fivetran & Airbyte (ELT / data integration), dbt (transformation), Hightouch & Census (reverse ETL) and Looker (BI) to store data in the warehouse, analyze & generate insights from it, and operationalize across the org.
- Post-ZIRP in 2022-2023, when data budgets tightened in 2023 and the unbundling trend of the modern data stack turned back towards re-bundling, reverse ETL died as a pure-play product category, proving too small a TAM to produce venture-scale outcomes, with companies struggling to connect reverse ETL to measured ROI and specific business outcomes. Of the core reverse ETL cohort, most companies joined bigger data platforms, with Census ($80M raised, Sequoia Capital) selling to Fivetran in May 2025, Boomi acquiring Rivery ($48M raised, Entrée Capital) for an estimated $100M in December 2024, and Airbyte acquiring Grouparoo ($3M raised, Eniac Ventures and Fuel Capital).
- To escape the commoditization of reverse ETL, Hightouch moved up the stack to the marketers on the receiving end of every sync—launching Customer Studio (2022) to build audiences with a no-code builder instead of SQL, Match Booster (2023) to onboard first-party data to Meta, TikTok & Google at 35-68% higher match rates, and identity resolution (2023)—pivoting from selling backend data movement to data teams as “reverse ETL” to becoming the frontend "composable CDP" to the data warehouse that marketers used every day. Selling to marketers shifted the economics from selling into the $50K/year budgets of data engineering teams to the multi-million dollar budgets of CMOs that are responsible for CDPs, ad targeting & marketing automation, mirroring the industry-wide move for CDPs to bundle value-added services (e.g., Segment with Twilio Engage) and verticalize CDP to specific industries, as in Rokt’s ($900M annualized revenue) $300M acquisition of mParticle for ecommerce & Amperity ($187M raised, Madrona Venture Group) in travel.
- As enterprises started directing budget towards AI applications & agents that need live customer context, Sacra estimates Hightouch hit $100M in ARR in April 2026, up from $85M at the end of 2025 (+143% YoY), valued at $2.75B as of its April 2026 Series D (Goldman Sachs Growth, Bain Capital Ventures) for a 27.5x multiple. Compare to Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO) at $1.3B TTM revenue in March 2026, up 30% YoY, valued at ~$9B for a ~7x multiple, Braze (NASDAQ: BRZE) at $738M in 2025, up 24% YoY, valued at ~$4B for a ~5x multiple, and LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP) at $813M TTM revenue, up 9% YoY, being acquired by Publicis for ~$2.2B or 2.7x revenue.
- End-user SaaS platforms (Braze, Klaviyo), CDPs (Hightouch) & data warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks) are converging on the common feature set of audience building, campaigns & creative generation, replacing marketers manually assembling segments with agents that autonomously spin up new campaigns from incoming customer data. After beginning with AI-powered recommendations & A/B testing, Hightouch's product now offers agents for automated campaign timing & personalization (AI Decisioning, 2024), AI-generated ad creative that syncs into Meta & Google (Ad Studio, April 2026) and AI-generated campaigns that sync into Braze & Klaviyo for sending (Lifecycle Studio, June 2026).
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Hightouch (dataset)
- Sean Lynch, co-founder of Census, on reverse ETL's role in the modern data stack
- Tristan Handy, CEO of dbt Labs, on dbt’s multi-cloud tailwinds
- Charles Chretien, co-founder of Prequel, on the modern data stack’s ROI problem
- Leah Weiss, co-founder of Preql, on delivering clean data to LLMs
- Conor McCarter, co-founder of Prequel, on the data integration market
- Fivetran (dataset)
- Databricks (dataset)
- dbt Labs vs Databricks vs Snowflake
- Salesforce, Amplitude, and the fat data layer in B2B SaaS
- Julia Schottenstein, Product Manager at dbt Labs, on the business model of open source
- Posthog (dataset)
- $58M/year hedgehog of product analytics
- PostHog: the $9.5M/year anti modern data stack company
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