Tejas Manohar

He grew up in TennesseeTennesseeTennessee is a U.S. state in the southeast-central United States, with its capital at Nashville. It was admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 6,910,840 residents.Open the full entry and began programming at a young age.⁠[1][2]

In a 2024 article he recalled that in fourth or fifth grade he wanted to make a website, being fascinated by websites and by playing games online; he found that a Word document could be exported as HTML and opened in a browser, and he then practised on W3Schools, writing code in Notepad and checking the results in his browser.⁠[2]

He writes that as he improved he built apps on his own for his school and for local community clubs, and that the true inflection point came when he began coding with others.⁠[2]

The episode page of the podcast The Fork in the Road says that he taught himself to code as a teenager, and its outline lists the influence of his immigrant parents as a topic at 2:30.⁠[3]

He recalled that as a high-school student looking for something to do over the summer, he read in a newspaper about a local startup in Tennessee that was in the 500 Startups program (now 500 Global) and sent it a cold email offering to work for free, and the company said yes; in this unpaid internship he learned Git and GitHub, how to collaborate, how to organize code and how to find his way around a large codebase.⁠[2]

He writes that later stepping stones included taking part in hackathons and, at 15, interning as a software engineer at HubSpot; he also worked in several contract positions.⁠[2]

On Act-On’s Rebel Instinct Podcast he said that he had worked at a couple of smaller startups before joining Segment.⁠[4]

His Y Combinator founder profile lists, under “Previously at,” Segment, Underrepresented Researchers of Color, the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, HubSpot, Lottery.com, Lottery.com (AutoLotto, Inc.), StudentRND, CodeDay and Populr, without giving roles or years.⁠[5]

He recalled that during his internship his team used tools such as Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google Analytics and KISSmetrics, which led him to follow the customer data platform company Segment; he first contributed to Segment’s open-source projects and then sent the company his résumé by cold email. On Act-On’s podcast he said that he had used Segment’s product and wrote to the founders saying he wanted to join in any role: “I want to join the team in any role I could.”⁠[2][4]

He writes that when applying he hid his age, removed the education section from his résumé and highlighted his contract positions; Segment invited him to an onsite in San Francisco with five interviews, and when his flight was booked the company discovered his age and asked whether it was legal for him to work. He found that a 16-year-old could work with a high-school diploma, which he had, and wrote that “CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry is actually super flexible with kids wanting to graduate early.” The outline of The Fork in the Road also lists, at 6:20, his being hired without revealing his age.⁠[2][3]

He flew to San Francisco, interviewed and received an offer, initially for $110,000; he writes that he kept reaching out to more companies in search of a better deal before joining Segment, and he calls the job his “ticket to Silicon Valley.” The article’s title says that he made $100,000 as a 16-year-old software engineer.⁠[2]

He wrote in 2023 that he joined Segment in 2016, when the company had only about 40 employees. In a 2025 interview he said: “At 16, I moved to San Francisco to join Segment as one of their first 10 engineers”; on Act-On’s podcast he described himself as “one of the first 10 engineers and product folks at Segment.”⁠[6][1][4]

He left Segment in 2019 to start Hightouch. Shortly after he left, Segment was acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion.⁠[6][7]

A 2025 Dorm Room Fund article relates that in 2018 Kashish Gupta turned down a return offer from Bessemer Venture Partners with only an idea, “a Slackbot for travel,” called Carry Travel; a year later Dorm Room Fund wrote a $20,000 check as its first backer, and Gupta used the money to buy a new MacBook and a one-way flight to San Francisco and moved into a house he shared with Tejas Manohar and Josh Curl.⁠[8]

The article states that he and Curl were both engineers at Segment at the time and that Curl was pivoting his own startup; Gupta recruited him to join full-time, and Curl soon followed him onto the founding team. Toni Oloko, a student investment partner at Dorm Room Fund, called him “one of the most prolific young engineers in Silicon Valley at the time.”⁠[8]

The article adds that the team went through six concepts, among them two travel ideas, a SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry-based customer service platform and customer dashboards, a period Gupta later called “pivot hell,” before landing on reverse ETL, which became Hightouch.⁠[8]

A 2025 TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry article states that he and Josh Curl, former colleagues at Segment, started Hightouch in 2019, teaming up with Curl’s friend Kashish Gupta, a machine learning specialist. Y Combinator’s company page gives Hightouch’s founding year as 2019; Hightouch took part in Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch (S19).⁠[7][9][10]

A 2026 Adweek article gives a different account: that Hightouch was founded in 2018 as part of Y Combinator, originally under the name Carry, running an AI travel agent inside Slack that Gupta described as “ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry for travel”; later in the same article it says the company was still operating as Carry in 2019.⁠[11]

Kashish Gupta wrote in November 2021 that less than two years earlier the founders’ travel and IoT startups had shut down because of COVID; they then built a dashboard offering a 360-degree view of customers, found that customers already had a central view of their data in the data warehouse and that the real pain was getting data out of the warehouse into everyday operational tools, and so turned to reverse ETL and started Hightouch.⁠[12]

The episode page of The Fork in the Road says that his first company collapsed during COVID and that this failure led to Hightouch; its outline lists his first startup and why it failed at 16:00, COVID’s sudden impact on the business at 18:00, and the pivot that became Hightouch at 20:00.⁠[3]

On December 16, 2020, Hightouch came out of stealth with a $2.1 million seed round led by Afore Capital and Slack Fund, with several angel investors taking part; the company had raised the money after its Y Combinator demo day but did not disclose it until it felt it had reached product-market fit.⁠[10]

The product at the time let users write SQL queries (or use a graphical interface for non-developers) to pull data from the warehouse, transform it into the format a destination required and send it to tools such as SalesforceSalesforceSalesforce is a U.S. enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco, providing cloud applications, data platforms and AI agent tools centered on customer relationship management (CRM).Open the full entry or Marketo; its core users were data teams, with B2C marketing teams and B2B sales teams as common use cases, and its named customers were Retool, Proof, Stream and Abacus. At Segment he and Josh Curl had seen much of the data flow into warehouses such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift; Kashish Gupta had been an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners.⁠[10]

He said: “Our goal is to be seen as the company that makes the warehouse not just for analytics but for these operational use cases.”⁠[10]

Adweek wrote in 2026 that the seed funding totaled $2.1 million and that the company’s first major infusion, a $600,000 round, came from Y Combinator, which put in around $150,000.⁠[11]

In July 2021 Hightouch raised a $12.1 million Series A led by Amplify Partners. Adweek wrote in 2026 that the round valued the company at $75 million and that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) was then $50,000.⁠[13][12][11]

Looking back in 2023, Hightouch wrote that in its Series A period it launched reverse ETL and pioneered the “Data Activation” category.⁠[14]

On November 17, 2021, Hightouch announced a $40 million Series B led by ICONIQ Growth, with existing investors including Amplify Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Y Combinator and Afore Capital, and angel investors including Gene Lee of Ramp, the Monte Carlo founder Barr Moses, the Airflow creator Maxime Beauchemin and Alex PallAlex PallAlex Pall is a DJ, music producer and member of The Chainsmokers, and a general partner at Mantis.Open the full entry of The Chainsmokers. The round came about four months after the Series A and brought total funding to $54.2 million, at a post-money valuation of $450 million; Kashish Gupta said the company had not been actively fundraising and that “multiple VCs wanted to pre-empt the round.”⁠[13]

By then the company had grown from four to 40 employees, its revenue had tripled, it had hundreds of customers, and it had formed a partnership with Snowflake and released Hightouch Audiences; it planned to double its headcount by 2022. Gupta wrote on the company blog that the engineering team had grown from one engineer at the start of the year to ten, that Doug Pepper was the company’s new board member, and that the office was in San Francisco’s Mission district. Adweek wrote in 2026 that at the Series B the company’s ARR was $1.3 million and its headcount 35.⁠[13][12][11]

On January 6, 2022, the Thiel Foundation named 23 people as its next class of Thiel Fellows; he was among them (item 22 of the list), aged 22 and based in San Francisco. The announcement says that the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, launched in 2011, encourages talented young people to pursue big ideas and start companies instead of attending college, and that the new fellows join 228 fellows from previous classes.⁠[15]

The announcement describes his project as Hightouch, which provides tools for companies to supercharge their marketing and sales initiatives by syncing data from warehouses into the tools business teams rely on, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo and Facebook ads.⁠[15]

On April 19, 2022, he, Kashish Gupta and Joshua Curl announced that Hightouch had acquired Workbase, a workflow automation startup founded by John Tan (co-founder and CEO) and Ed Parsons (co-founder and CTO) that let marketers build automated triggers based on customer behavior without engineering help. The announcement says Hightouch had lacked workflow automation and that the Workbase team also brought expertise in product-led sales; the terms were not disclosed.⁠[16]

On April 21, 2022, he and Alec Haase published “The CDP as we know it is dead: introducing the Composable CDP” on the Hightouch blog, which describes a traditional customer data platform (CDP) as an all-in-one data platform built for marketing teams that operates in a data silo separate from the data warehouse, with its features bundled into a tightly integrated all-in-one solution that often takes three to six months to start, whereas a “Composable CDP” operates directly from the data warehouse, letting companies choose the best solutions and components for collection, transformation and activation and start activating their data in hours or days rather than the months or quarters of a typical off-the-shelf CDP. In it he wrote: “Prior to founding Hightouch, I was an early engineer at Segment.”⁠[17]

Hightouch wrote in 2023 that the launch of Customer Studio was when it coined the term “the Composable CDP.”⁠[14]

American Kahani wrote on December 2, 2022, that he and his Hightouch co-founder Kashish Gupta were named to the Enterprise Technology category of the 11th edition of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list; the article says Hightouch helps organizations such as SpotifySpotifySpotify is an audio streaming subscription service offering on-demand music, podcasts, and audiobooks through a free ad-supported service and a paid Premium subscription. Its parent company, Spotify Technology S.A., is incorporated in Luxembourg, has its principal operations in Stockholm, Sweden, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SPOT). It helped move the recorded-music business from buying and owning music to on-demand streaming and is one of the largest audio streaming subscription services by users.Open the full entry, AutoTrader and the NBANBAThe National Basketball Association (NBA) is a North American professional basketball league with 30 teams.Open the full entry sync customer information from data stores into software tools such as Salesforce and Facebook Ads.⁠[18]

On July 19, 2023, he and Kashish Gupta announced that Hightouch had raised $38 million led by Bain Capital Ventures, with the existing investors ICONIQ Capital and Amplify Partners participating, and unveiled the warehouse-native Customer 360 Toolkit product line, starting with Identity Resolution and supported by Schema Builder, Match Booster and Traits; the customers it names include PetSmart and Cars.com.⁠[14]

Adweek wrote in 2026 that the $38 million was raised as a SAFE valuing the company at $615 million.⁠[11]

On August 8, 2023, he and Kashish Gupta announced a strategic investment in Hightouch by HubSpot Ventures, HubSpot’s investment arm, as part of the $38 million funding; the post calls HubSpot one of the most popular data destinations on Hightouch, notes that HubSpot named Hightouch one of its Essential Apps for Marketers, and says Hightouch uses HubSpot for its own email campaigns and lead routing.⁠[19]

On August 30, 2023, he and Kashish Gupta announced that Databricks Ventures had joined Hightouch’s $38 million funding as a strategic investor; the post says the two companies had begun working together a few years earlier and shared more than 100 customers, including Grammarly, PetSmart and MEWS, with the aim of building a Composable CDP for marketers on the Databricks Lakehouse.⁠[20]

On November 16, 2023, he, Kashish Gupta and Joshua Curl announced that Hightouch had acquired HeadsUp, founded by Earl Lee and Momo Ong, which used AI and machine learning to model complex data into Customer 360 profiles and predict conversions for customers such as Contentful and Dialpad. Earl Lee, HeadsUp’s CEO, joined Hightouch to lead Customer 360 development; the terms were not disclosed.⁠[21]

On January 9, 2024, he published “How I made $100,000 as a 16-year-old software engineer” on the Hightouch blog, recounting how he learned to code and came to join Segment, and writing: “And today, I’m 24 years old and the founder of a startup valued at $600 million.”⁠[2]

His advice to readers in the article is to keep improving their skills, to work with others even unpaid, and to contribute to open source, which he credits with helping him land the Segment job.⁠[2]

In August 2024 Hightouch launched AI Decisioning, an agentic AI product: marketers set a goal and AI agents deliver personalized messages to each customer across email, push, in-app messaging and advertising, running experiments to find the best approach. He said the agents can “run thousands of experiments to figure out the best experience to deliver.”⁠[7][22]

Hightouch wrote in 2025 that AI Decisioning combines reinforcement learning with other models built in-house, that each customer sets up its own reinforcement-learning agent with goals, guardrails and campaigns it can use, and that the product took about 18 months to build on top of the Composable CDP the company had spent about four years building.⁠[22]

On February 18, 2025, Hightouch announced an $80 million Series C at a $1.2 billion post-money valuation, roughly double its 2023 valuation; Sapphire Ventures led the round, with NVC, Amplify Partners, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, Y Combinator and Afore Capital participating, and the Sapphire Ventures partner Rajeev Dham joined the board.⁠[7][22]

At the time he and Kashish Gupta were co-CEOs and Josh Curl was CTO. The customer data platform the company launched in 2020 syncs data with more than 250 tools, and its customers include Spotify, PetSmart, Tripadvisor and Grammarly. Speaking of Segment, he said: “Asking customers to get data into Segment was an onerous task.”⁠[7]

Hightouch’s announcement says its Composable CDP business grew more than 100% over the previous year and cites PetSmart’s more than 70 million Treats Rewards members. Adweek wrote in 2026 that the company’s ARR at the Series C was about $35 million.⁠[22][11]

On July 29, 2025, he, Kashish Gupta and Joshua Curl announced investments in Hightouch by Snowflake Ventures and Capital OneCapital OneCapital One Financial Corporation is a diversified financial services holding company headquartered in McLean, Virginia, with Credit Card, Consumer Banking and Commercial Banking segments; since completing its acquisition of Discover in 2025 it has owned the Discover, PULSE and Diners Club International networks, and its stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry Ventures, extending its oversubscribed Series C and deepening its partnerships with the two companies; the amount was not disclosed.⁠[23]

In a Pulse 2.0 interview published on August 27, 2025, he said that Hightouch’s revenue had more than doubled over the past year, that it had about 170 employees and had raised $172 million in total, and that it had strategic partnerships with Snowflake and Databricks; PetSmart uses Hightouch to personalize journeys for its loyalty program of more than 70 million members and also uses AI Decisioning. Discussing competition, he said the company had grown more than 120% the previous year and that he could name more than ten CDP vendors offhand.⁠[1]

He said the company’s next focus was to accelerate development of AI Decisioning, expand the team, especially in sales and engineering, grow its enterprise customer base, and help Fortune 500 companies unlock the full potential of their data. Discussing the size of the market, he said customers were expanding their use of Hightouch into product experiences, e-commerce, advertising networks and customer service.⁠[1]

On April 14, 2026, the podcast The Fork in the Road, hosted by Perry S. Kaufman, released an interview with him, “From Failed Startup to $200M Company | Tejas Manohar,” 49 minutes and 3 seconds long. The episode page says Hightouch had raised more than $200 million and grown from three founders to more than 350 employees; its outline includes, in order, his early interest in programming, the influence of his immigrant parents, being hired at 16, learning at Segment, the failure of his first startup, the pivot to Hightouch, the first three customers, growth through communities, content and sales, building leadership from 3 people to 350, raising $200 million and the investor mindset, and advice on agency, resourcefulness and curiosity.⁠[3]

On April 29, 2026, he, Kashish Gupta and Joshua Curl announced that Hightouch had raised $150 million at a $2.75 billion valuation, led by Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry (the Growth Equity team at Goldman Sachs Alternatives) and Bain Capital Ventures, with Amplify Partners, ICONIQ Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Y Combinator and TD7, the venture arm of The Trade Desk, participating.⁠[24][25]

The announcement says the company had spent six years building marketing technology on the data warehouse and was convinced that “Agentic Marketing” is the future, with Hightouch Ad Studio as its first end-to-end product for this workflow; it also says that, as more work takes place in AI tools, Hightouch’s MCP integration means agents running in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any enterprise AI can tap into Hightouch directly. The customers it names include DraftKings, Domino’s, Ramp and Spotify. The Goldman Sachs press release says Hightouch has grown more than 100% in each of the past two years.⁠[24][25]

Adweek wrote in June 2026 that on January 10 Kashish Gupta, a Hightouch co-founder, was putting together a pitch deck on a long-haul flight from India back to the U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry for a fundraising process he would start the following day, that term sheets were in his inbox by January 31, and that by late April Gupta and his co-founders, the co-CEO Tejas Manohar and the CTO Josh Curl, had closed the Series D. The article’s headline says Hightouch raised $322 million across six rounds; the article puts its ARR at $100 million and its headcount above 400 at the time of the Series D.⁠[11]

AxiosAxiosAxios is a US digital news media company founded in 2016 by former Politico executives Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz and launched in January 2017. It is known for short news items and industry newsletters in the “Smart Brevity” style, especially for its Washington political coverage, and publishes local news newsletters in cities across the United States through Axios Local. Since 2022 it has been owned by Cox Enterprises.Open the full entry wrote on June 16, 2026, that the previous week Hightouch had sent a letter to the board of Publicis GroupePublicis GroupePublicis Groupe is a multinational communications and marketing services group headquartered in Paris, founded in 1926 by Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, listed on Euronext Paris and a component of France’s CAC 40 index. Its businesses span advertising creativity, media, data (Epsilon), digital consulting and technology (Publicis Sapient) and healthcare communications.Open the full entry offering $800 million to $1.2 billion in cash and stock for LiveRamp’s identity and data onboarding businesses, including RampID and LiveRamp Connect, financed through cash, debt financing and Hightouch equity; the month before, Publicis had announced a $2.2 billion all-cash deal to take LiveRamp private. Axios wrote that Hightouch said the amount was based on publicly available information and that its final offer could change after due diligence, that it would withdraw the proposal if it did not hear from Publicis by June 26, and that Publicis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Adweek wrote in June 2026 that Hightouch had approached Publicis with an offer of up to $1.2 billion for the identity business at the heart of LiveRamp, and that Publicis declined to comment.⁠[26][11]

As of November 2026, his author page on Hightouch’s website describes him as the company’s co-founder and co-CEO, leading its Agentic Marketing vision, and says that at Segment he concluded that traditional CDPs were slow, fragmented and disconnected from company data, which led him to found Hightouch.⁠[27]

His Fast Company Executive Board member page likewise lists him as co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch, based in San Francisco. Y Combinator’s company page gives Hightouch’s team size as 200.⁠[28][9]

His Fast Company Executive Board and MAU Vegas biographies say that outside work he enjoys running and competitive table tennis.⁠[28][29]

On Act-On’s Rebel Instinct Podcast he said that outside work he is impromptu and often throws himself into one pursuit for a few months at a time, such as getting a table tennis coach for three months, going deep into powerlifting for a few months, or buying a harmonica to learn for a few months.⁠[4]

In the same episode he said that he admires Steve JobsSteve JobsSteve Jobs (1955–2011) was a technology entrepreneur, Apple co-founder, NeXT founder, and investor and former CEO of Pixar. His career spanned personal computing, digital music, smartphones and animated films, with an emphasis on product design, user experience and multidisciplinary teams.Open the full entry: “I read his biography back when I was in school and I was super, super inspired by it.”⁠[4]

He has bylined more than 60 posts on the Hightouch blog, covering the company’s funding and acquisition announcements, the Composable CDP and reverse ETL, lakehouses and Iceberg, AI agents in marketing, and case studies such as Spotify Wrapped and Snowflake.⁠[27]

On Act-On’s podcast he said that his background is in engineering and that until founding Hightouch he had not been a marketing-technology or marketing person: “My background is in engineering”; “I’ve never been the MarTech person or the marketer myself, I guess until founding Hightouch.”⁠[4]

His GitHub profile bio reads “Co-Founder of Hightouch,” with the status “constantly in cramming mode”; his pinned repositories include the Node.js framework koa, the job scheduler node-schedule, HubSpot’s Singularity, Segment’s glue, and his own cspromise, which provides Go-style CSP constructs for JavaScript promises.⁠[30]

Hightouch: Official website: https://hightouch.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

Segment: Official website: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/segment (opens in a new window).⁠[32]

HubSpot: Official website: https://www.hubspot.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[34]

X: Public account: https://x.com/tejasmanohar (opens in a new window).⁠[5][28]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejasmanohar/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5][28]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/tejasmanohar (opens in a new window).⁠[30]