We're excited to share that in July, Hightouch, one of our Innovation Fund portfolio companies, announced a strategic investment from Snowflake Ventures and Capital One Ventures to extend their oversubscribed Series C round. This investment underscores the growing momentum behind agentic AI as the next evolution in marketing technology and validates Hightouch's position as a pioneer in redefining how marketers work.
As with a number of our existing investments, Hightouch represents another compelling example of our dual investor+customer strategy, where we are both investors in the company, as well as customers of the product (giving us unique and first hand insights into the business).
The AI agent revolution in marketing
In 2024, Hightouch introduced the world's first agentic AI product for lifecycle marketing called AI Decisioning. These AI agents continuously experiment with messaging, timing, and channel decisions, enabling marketers to deliver truly personalized experiences at scale. Rather than relying on traditional segmentation, these agents market to every customer as an individual, adapting in real-time based on comprehensive data analysis.
By embedding learning and execution directly into the AI Data Cloud, Hightouch is pioneering a new model where marketers work alongside AI agents that remove manual bottlenecks and reduce dependency on legacy marketing clouds. This approach has quickly gained traction with enterprises, who have adopted AI Decisioning to accelerate learning, increase campaign velocity, and drive incremental engagement and sales.
Our experience as both investor and customer
As a Hightouch customer, Fundrise has been working closely with the company to redefine our marketing operations. We've experienced firsthand how their platform transforms marketing workflows and delivers measurable results.
Our partnership with Hightouch demonstrates several key benefits:
Operational transformation: Almost all of our investor communications, including recent emails and push notifications, are now powered by Hightouch. This has enabled our marketing and product teams to operate with greater autonomy while reducing engineering overhead.
Performance improvements: Through Hightouch's AI Decisioning platform, we've seen a 4x increase in investments from our win-back campaigns compared to traditional approaches, while maintaining the same number of orders placed. This demonstrates the platform's ability to drive higher-value customer actions.
Strategic insights: The platform's AI agents continuously surface unexpected patterns and correlations that humans can't easily detect, providing actionable insights that inform both immediate campaign optimization and broader strategic decisions.
Team efficiency: Hightouch has enabled our lifecycle marketing team to shift from tactical execution to strategic orchestration, focusing on understanding customer needs rather than managing campaign calendars and journey flows.
Market validation and strategic partnerships
The investment from Snowflake Ventures and Capital One Ventures represents significant strategic validation. Increasingly, Hightouch customers are leveraging Snowflake's AI Data Cloud and LLM capabilities, including Snowflake Cortex AI, via the Hightouch Composable CDP. This growing integration highlights the power of warehouse-native architectures and composable marketing technology stacks.
The partnership with Snowflake is particularly compelling because it allows marketers to execute faster with less complexity and more control, building directly on top of unified data and AI platforms. This approach eliminates the traditional constraints of marketing clouds and enables new ways of working that weren't previously possible.
Looking ahead
The additional capital and strategic support will fuel Hightouch's ongoing research and development into how AI agents can transform marketing workflows. The company plans to expand its suite of agents to cover additional marketing use cases, helping marketers move from traditional workflows to rapid, data-driven campaign execution.
This expansion positions Hightouch to capitalize on the broader shift toward AI-powered business operations, where intelligent agents augment human capabilities rather than replace them. As both investors and customers, we're excited to continue working with Hightouch as they pioneer this transformation.
The dual investor+customer advantage
Our experience with Hightouch exemplifies the power of our investor+customer approach. By using their platform in our own operations, we gain unique insights into product performance, market adoption, and growth potential that purely financial investors cannot access. This direct experience validates our investment thesis while also improving our own business operations—a true win-win scenario.
As Hightouch continues to expand its AI agent capabilities and deepen its integration with the broader data infrastructure ecosystem, we're well-positioned to benefit both as investors and as customers driving our own marketing transformation forward.
* The fund's full portfolio holdings are available here.

