Strategic acquisition expands Data Activation into European market
Hightouch, the leader in Data Activation and Reverse ETL, has announced its acquisition of the London-based knowledge management startup Whatis–a move that accelerates Hightouch’s path towards owning the market in implementing Data Activation on an enterprise scale.
Two of Whatis’ co-founders, Hugo Darwood and Mitchell Friedman, worked at leading tech companies including Wayve, Twilio, and Deliveroo, before launching Whatis in 2020.
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“The Whatis team has been building Data Activation since 2018 when they were on the restaurants data engineering team at Deliveroo,” says Kashish Gupta, Co-CEO of Hightouch. “So when the Whatis team set out to build extensions of their platform into Salesforce and other SaaS tools, it clicked on both sides that we ought to work together as one company.”
Darwood describes the acquisition as a natural fit given Whatis’ mission of activating siloed knowledge: “Whatis addressed the complicated nature of operations, which meant teams could lack context and waste time searching thousands of wiki pages.” Now, Darwood says, “Joining Hightouch allows us to continue our mission of helping teams focus on meaningful work.”
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Mitchell Friedman says that interactions with Whatis customers gave him a renewed appreciation for the data warehouse–which makes him particularly excited to join Hightouch’s warehouse-centric method of Data Activation. “As we grew, we saw the importance of the warehouse, with customers asking to directly integrate data from their warehouse into Whatis to make real-time metrics accessible to their teams,” says Friedman.
Hightouch VP of Engineering Corey Stein says the synergy between Hightouch and Whatis was obvious from his first conversation with them: “I was struck by how value-aligned they were to the type of engineering team we’re building at Hightouch, finding the most efficient way to provide value for our customers while also building against a longer-term plan.”
With the Whatis acquisition Hightouch expands its global presence to Europe, with offices now in San Francisco, New York, Sydney, and London.
