data-activation
(13)
BlueConic Spent 15 Years Teaching Brands Who Their Customers Are. Now It Wants the Machine to Make the Next Move
The Dutch-born customer data platform built its name unifying messy first-party data. With Jebbit, Blueshift and a new crop of AI agents, BlueConic is betting that the next valuable layer is not another dashboard - it is the decision made while the customer is still there.
Kashish Gupta Kept Killing Good Ideas Until Hightouch Found Its Job
A travel bot died, four ideas vanished in three months, and a warehouse plumbing problem became a marketing company. Kashish Gupta’s useful obsession is not being right first - it is learning fast enough to earn the next move.
Tejas Manohar
Tejas Manohar is the cofounder and co-CEO of Hightouch, the San Francisco company that helped create the Composable CDP category by bringing customer data platform capabilities directly onto the data warehouse. He moved to San Francisco at 16 to become one of Segment's first ten engineers, then left in 2018 to start Hightouch with Kashish Gupta and Josh Curl. Under his leadership Hightouch has crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue and raised a $150M Series D in April 2026 at a $2.75B valuation, pivoting the company toward AI Decisioning and agentic marketing.
GrowthLoop
GrowthLoop is an agentic, composable customer data platform (CDP) that runs directly on a company's cloud data warehouse - Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks or Redshift - so marketing teams can build audiences, orchestrate journeys, and measure results without copying data into a separate system. Formerly Flywheel Software, the company pitches a 'Compound Marketing Engine' that pairs a no-code, drag-and-drop audience builder with AI 'Growth Agents' that suggest segments, build journeys, and optimize campaigns. It serves large enterprises including Ford, Costco, Albertsons, NerdWallet and major sports organizations.
Lava.ai
Lava.ai is a San Francisco software company that runs a Realtime AI customer-engagement platform for sports teams, live-event venues, retailers and large enterprises. Its engine ties together ticketing, point-of-sale, mobile wallets, apps, parking and live game feeds through 250+ integrations, then uses AI to deliver personalized offers, membership perks, stored-value rewards and clienteling 'in the moment.' Co-founded by TIBCO founder Vivek Ranadive and former TIBCO executive Wen Miao, Lava counts more than 50 franchises and brands - including the NBA, Real Madrid, the LA Rams and the Cleveland Browns - among its users.
AI Squared
AI Squared is an enterprise AI integration company that helps organizations move machine learning and generative AI out of pilots and into the tools employees already use - CRMs, ERPs, spreadsheets, and custom apps. Its platform connects governed data sources like Databricks and Snowflake to business applications, addressing the 'last mile' problem that keeps most AI projects from reaching production. The company serves financial institutions, supply chain firms, and U.S. government agencies, and stewards the open-source reverse ETL project Multiwoven.
Jimmy McCloud
Jimmy McCloud is the Founder & CEO of DISTINCT Technologies, a live data intelligence platform that helps global brands capture and act on consumer data at live events - concerts, sports activations, fan zones, and brand experiences. With a career spanning MLB Advanced Media (where the team built what became Disney+), Entercom/Audacy (as EVP of National Business Development), and Division I baseball at Holy Cross, McCloud brings a rare combination of sports media pedigree and enterprise sales acumen to solving one of marketing's oldest problems: making live brand moments measurable. DISTINCT raised a $3.5M seed round in June 2024 led by York IE.
Journify
Journify is an AI-powered, composable customer data platform that captures, cleans, enriches, and streams conversion signals from web, mobile, CRM, and offline sources into ad platforms like Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Google. The company helps brands push match rates toward 90%, reclaiming the 30-40% of conversions most advertisers silently lose.
Simon AI
Simon AI, formerly Simon Data, is a New York-based marketing technology company that builds an AI-first, composable customer data platform with embedded AI agents. Its Agentic Marketing Platform lets marketing teams reason over live customer and contextual data in their own data cloud to detect signals like churn risk and demand spikes, turn messy data into campaign-ready attributes, and orchestrate personalized campaigns across channels and tools like Braze, Attentive, and Iterable. Founded in 2013 by data scientists Jason Davis and Matt Walker, the company has raised roughly $117.8M and serves fast-growing and enterprise brands including SeatGeek, Equinox, Tripadvisor, ASOS, Venmo, and BarkBox.
LiveRamp
LiveRamp is a data collaboration platform that helps companies connect, control, and activate their first-party data across the marketing and advertising ecosystem without giving up control of it. Born from the simple idea of an 'on-ramp' that links offline customer records to online channels, LiveRamp now runs a privacy-centric identity graph (RampID) and a cloud-native data clean room used by brands, agencies, retail media networks, and publishers to match, measure, and monetize data securely.
Hightouch
Hightouch is a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS company that pioneered Reverse ETL and built the leading Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP). Founded in 2018 by Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta - all alumni of Segment - Hightouch lets companies activate their warehouse data directly into 250+ business tools like Salesforce, Braze, and Google Ads without copying data to a separate CDP. Since launching AI Decisioning in 2024, Hightouch has evolved into an agentic marketing platform, helping brands like Warner Music Group, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify orchestrate personalized customer journeys using live warehouse data. The company reached $100M ARR and a $2.75B valuation in April 2026, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures.
Chris O'Neill
Chris O'Neill is a veteran technology executive with 25+ years of leadership across Google, Evernote, Glean, and Xero. Best known for leading Evernote's turnaround as CEO (2015-2018) and doubling its user base, he joined GrowthLoop as CEO in August 2024, steering the composable CDP startup through its AI transformation and Series D funding. A Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth) MBA and former Google Canada Managing Director who scaled that business to billions in revenue, O'Neill is also a board director at Gap Inc. and a published contributor to Fast Company and Fortune on the themes of AI, leadership, and compound growth.
Taoufik Jamali
Taoufik Jamali is a Moroccan-born serial entrepreneur and CEO of Journify, an AI-powered composable Customer Data Platform that pushes ad conversion match rates from ~42% to 70-90% through privacy-first, server-side data activation. With two successful startup exits under his belt - Netclub (sold to Match.com in 2007) and Unyk (acquired by Viadeo in 2009) - and stints as VP of Growth at Shopkick and VP of Product/PLG at Smartsheet, Jamali founded Journify in 2023 and grew it to $1M ARR within nine months, raised $4M in 2025, and doubled the company valuation in under six months as he targets the broken attribution problem plaguing e-commerce advertisers globally.