Customer data-syncing startup Hightouch announced today it has acquired HeadsUp. As part of the deal, HeadsUp co-founder Earl Lee will join Hightouch, working on Customer 360, a product that uses AI and machine learning to help clients manage and collaborate on customer data. Terms of the deal were undisclosed. Both companies are based in San Francisco.
Before its acquisition, HeadsUp raised backing from investors like 645 Ventures and reached six figures in ARR. Its tools helped growth teams at product-led growth companies like Netlify, Contentful, Dialed and Matillion use customer data to spot the right time to sell to customers. Hightouch recently hit a valuation of $615 million after its last funding round.
Hightouch co-founder Josh Curl told TechCrunch that the startup’s early product was focused on data-syncing, but it has since expanded into areas like Customer 360, that bring it closer to HeadsUp’s mission.
“It’s actually very similar to who might be a high value customer in a year and those things,” Curl says. “I think the idea of value assessment based on programmatic signals and things like that are a very big deal in both B2C and B2B. It’s not a one-for-one comparison, but I think a lot of what the Customer 360 toolkit is trying to do is very similar to the HeadsUp deck.”
Hightouch co-founders Josh Curl, Kashish Gupta and Tejas Manohar
Lee says that Hightouch has already done a lot of work building downstream functionalities to help marketing and data teams at companies make better use of their data warehouses for things like ad targeting and audience segmentation. Lee will focus on helping Hightouch’s clients get to the point where their data is ready to leverage Hightouch’s downstream tools.
Before founding HeadsUp in 2020, Lee worked at Fiscalnote, the data-tracking SaaS company. There, he built out the internal data analytics site, which meant starting a data warehouse and building tooling on top of it, including Segment and Looker. The experience made Lee realize that every organization could benefit from a cloud data warehouse stack, which is one of the reasons he started HeadsUp.
“If you think about what Hightouch does as a company, and what my mission is within Hightouch, it’s really to build the sorts of tools that enable more organizations to get value out of all the data that they’re bringing into their warehouse,” he said.
Curl first met Lee and HeadsUp co-founder Momo Ong (who is not joining Hightouch) through mutual friends just as HeadsUp was launching, and kept in touch because their companies were in adjacent spaces.
“I think that really intensified over this past summer, when we decided to chart out what path we wanted to take with HeadsUp,” says Lee. “We realized that, fundamentally, there was a lot of overlap and long-term vision with what we wanted to accomplish as a company alongside what Hightouch was doing.”
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