data-activation
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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.
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.
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.