The engineer who moved the data instead of the company
Tejas Manohar was still a teenager in Tennessee when he decided that the interesting work was happening two thousand miles away. At sixteen, he packed up and moved to San Francisco to take a job as one of the first ten engineers at Segment, a company then trying to solve one of the least glamorous and most valuable problems in software: how to collect a company's customer data in one place. He later wrote an essay about that stretch of his life with a title that leaves little to the imagination, "How I Made $100,000 as a 16-Year-Old Software Engineer."
Most people that age are learning to drive. Manohar was learning what a customer data platform could and could not do, from the inside, at the company that defined the category. Segment would go on to be acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion. But long before that exit, Manohar was watching something that bothered him.
The pitch for a customer data platform, or CDP, was clean: bring all of your customer data into one system, then use it to personalize marketing. The reality was messier. Customers kept running into the same wall. They could not, or would not, copy all their data into yet another piece of software.
At the same time, a shift was reshaping the entire industry. Data warehouses - Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks - were becoming the place where companies already kept everything. The data was there. It was clean, governed, and central. The problem was that marketing tools could not reach it. To build a full picture of a customer, you had to move and restructure everything into a separate system, which was expensive, slow, and limiting.
Manohar and his eventual cofounders, Kashish Gupta and Josh Curl, arrived at a question that sounds obvious in hindsight and was heretical at the time: instead of forcing companies to move their data into a CDP, why not bring the CDP to the data?
Inventing a category
That question became Hightouch, founded around 2018 and accepted into Y Combinator's 2019 batch. The early product did something the industry had a clumsy name for - Reverse ETL - syncing data out of the warehouse and into the operational tools where teams actually work: ad platforms, email systems, CRMs. It let data teams activate their existing infrastructure without burning months of engineering time.
What grew out of that was a new category, the Composable CDP, which took the promise of the old customer data platform and rebuilt it on top of the warehouse a company already trusted. Hightouch did not try to be the new system of record. It made the system of record useful to marketers.
The bet paid off. Hightouch has crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. In April 2026 it raised a $150 million Series D led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Iconiq Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Amplify Partners, Y Combinator, and the venture arm of The Trade Desk. The round valued the company at $2.75 billion, more than double its valuation a year earlier.
The next reinvention
Founders who invent a category often spend the rest of their careers defending it. Manohar has done the opposite. As co-CEO, he has been steering Hightouch toward AI Decisioning and what the company calls agentic marketing - using AI to decide, in real time, what message or experience each customer should get, and increasingly letting AI agents do the orchestration that marketing teams used to hand-build.
His ambition reaches past marketing's traditional edges. He talks about extending customer data into product experiences, e-commerce, and customer service, not just campaigns. The through-line, from Segment to Reverse ETL to AI agents, is consistent: meet the data where it lives, and make it do more.
For all the talk of platforms and valuations, Manohar tends to answer questions about his proudest moments by pointing somewhere smaller and more human.
He skipped the traditional college path entirely, going from teenage internships - including a stint at HubSpot - and a KPCB Engineering Fellowship straight into frontline work. When he is not thinking about data, he runs and plays competitive table tennis, the kind of hobbies that suit someone who has spent his career trying to be a step ahead. He also sits on the Forbes Technology Council and the Fast Company Executive Board, writing about the future of marketing technology from the vantage point of someone who helped build a chunk of it.
The story that keeps repeating is the same one that started in Tennessee. See a wall everyone else has accepted. Ask why it has to be there. Then build the thing that goes around it. Manohar did it at sixteen when he ignored the usual script for a teenager, he did it when he left a great job at Segment to chase an idea, and he is doing it again now as he wagers a $2.75 billion company on a future run by AI. The bets keep getting bigger. The instinct has not changed.