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AI NewsHightouch reaches $100M ARR fueled by marketing tools powered by AI

Hightouch reaches $100M ARR fueled by marketing tools powered by AI

1:56 AM IST · April 16, 2026

Hightouch reaches $100M ARR fueled by marketing tools powered by AI

Historically, marketers relied on designers and other creative professionals to develop images and videos for personalized online ad campaigns. In late 2024, seven-year-old startupHightouchlaunched an AI-powered service that allows marketing professionals to create custom content for brands such as Domino’s, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify without involving brand design teams or ad agencies. The offering has been highly successful. Since introducing its AI product 20 months ago, Hightouch has added $70 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), it tells TechCrunch, bringing the startup to a total of $100 million in ARR. “Before GenAI, it was impossible for someone without many, many years of design skills to create consumer-level assets,” said Kashish Gupta, Hightouch’s co-CEO. The company is also led by co-CEO Tejas Manohar, a former engineering manager at Segment, a customer data platform acquired by Twilio for$3.2 billionin 2020. However, Hightouch’s approach goes beyond what standard AI models can do on their own. Hightouch says that many brands initially attempted to generate ad campaigns using general foundational models — broad AI systems that power tools like chatbots but lack knowledge of specific brands — only to find the resulting images and videos failed to meet “on-brand” standards. “Foundation models didn’t know about specific consumer brands, whether it was colors or fonts, tone, or assets,” Gupta says. “The LLMs would hallucinate products that didn’t exist, and you can’t do advertising and emails on products that don’t exist.” To ensure brand consistency, Hightouch connects directly to its customers’ existing creative tools, such as the popular design platform Figma, photo libraries, and content management systems (CMS). By pulling from these sources, the platform “learns” a company’s specific brand identity. Hightouch’s AI agents then use these photos, designs, and customer insights to help marketers build personalized ad campaigns autonomously, without having to wait on designers or developers. The goal of Hightouch’s AI is to create images and videos that look like they were made by professional designers, avoiding the “fake” or generic look often associated with AI. “For example, Domino’s will never generate a pizza,” Gupta says. “They’ll always use existing images of pizza, and they’ll place it into an ad where the background might be generated, and other things might be generated around it.” The company, which now employs approximately 380 people, was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025 when it raised an$80 million Series Cfunding round led by Sapphire Ventures. Pictured above, left to right: Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta

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Meet the startup helping Wall Street put a price on AI compute

Meet the startup helping Wall Street put a price on AI compute

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 The AI buildout shows no signs of slowing. And with hundreds of billions of dollars a year going into data centers and GPUs, compute has become the single biggest cost for anyone building AI products. But for all that spending, there still isn’t a straightforward way to put a price on compute — or for firms to hedge their exposure when the price changes. Silicon Data just closed a $30 million Series A to change that. The startup aims to become the reference price for GPU rental and an index that a Wall Street futures contract would settle against. The company plans to launch its compute futures tradingon the CME October 5th, pending regulatory approval.On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined bySteve Hou, head of research at Silicon Data, to discuss the health of the AI buildout, and why the data is telling a different story than the doom and gloom headlines about depreciating chips andstalleddata centers. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.

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Researchers say OpenAI revoked their access to limited cyber program

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Several security researchers say OpenAI suddenly revoked their access to a limited-access program that removes some restrictions on using its AI tools for cybersecurity research. OpenAI confirmed that the issue was caused by an error. On Wednesday, multiple researchers on OpenAI’s officialsupportforumsand on X reported having their access to the Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program revoked. The people said that when they opened ChatGPT’s Cyberpage, a message appeared saying their identity could not be verified or that their account “is ineligible at this time.” TAC isa special programthrough which OpenAI offers vetted researchers access to the company’s most advanced AI models with fewer cybersecurity guardrails than the models that regular users can access. Anthropic offers a similar program called theCyber Verification Program, or CVP. The idea behind TAC and CVP is to give trusted defenders better models so they can report bugs and vulnerabilities to companies, with the aim of getting flaws patched faster. The goal is also to prevent cybercriminals and malicious hackers from accessing those models and use them to find bugs and develop exploits to hack companies. To get access to TAC, cybersecurity researchers have to submit an ID and be vetted by OpenAI. At this point, it’s not entirely clear why these researchers are getting their access to TAC revoked, nor how many people have had this issue. TechCrunch spoke to five researchers who said they have had this problem. One researcher said OpenAI sent an email saying that their access to Daybreak Blue, the latest vetted tier of TAC, was revoked “due to a technical issue affecting a limited number of users.” “This was an issue on our end, and not the user experience we want to deliver,” read the message, which the researcher shared with TechCrunch. In a thread on OpenAI’s forums,a researcher wrotethat after they reached out to the official support, the company also cited a “recent technical issue” that caused some users to lose access to Daybreak Blue. In both messages, OpenAI asked the researchers to reapply and complete the verification process. All the researchers TechCrunch spoke to said they live outside of the U.S. and Europe, suggesting the revocations may be limited to certain regions. OpenAI referred TechCrunchto a tweetin which the company said a “limited set of users’ access to Daybreak Blue is no longer active and they will need to re-verify to maintain their access.” Daybreak Blue is the latest tier for individual researchers that grants access to “frontier general-purpose models, including GPT‑5.6 Sol, with safeguards tailored to authorized defensive security work,”according to OpenAI, which launched it on August 10. “It is the recommended starting point for most defenders, supporting vulnerability discovery, secure code review, malware analysis, incident response, and patch validation.” At the same time, the company also introduced a higher tier called Daybreak Red that gives access to models made specifically for cybersecurity research, which allow vetted users to do “authorized vulnerability research, exploit validation, and security testing.” In recent months, both defensive and offensive security researchershave complained about the guardrailsimposed by Anthropic and OpenAI, arguing that the guardrails prevent them from doing legitimate work. Updated with comment from OpenAI.

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AI was supposed to win people over by now — it hasn’t

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 Even Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, one of the industry’s most prominent leaders,admitted in a post on X this weekthat negative public perception of AI is a “big problem” that’s fundamentally a “crisis of trust.” He said people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry, as they “suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.” The solution, he said, was to deliver on AI’s promises — for example, curing cancer. “I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us,” he noted.

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