Somewhere between the breathless AI hype and the purported death of $1,000-a-seat software subscriptions (opens in new tab) — known by industry folk as the “SaaSpocalypse” — a more nuanced story is playing out.

Kashish Gupta sees it clearly from his new office in downtown San Francisco. The co-CEO of Hightouch, a data and AI startup, raised $150 million in Series D last month, at a valuation of $2.75 billion. His mandate for that investment — led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Bain Capital Ventures — is simple: grow, grow, grow. 

To do that, he needs to hire many more people. When Gupta and his two cofounders launched Hightouch’s first product five years ago, the company employed about a dozen people. The workforce reached 200 last year and more than 400 in the last four months.

Hence, the need for the 13,000-square-foot office on the top floor of 315 Montgomery St. 

At a time when many Big Tech firms are cutting jobs, it’s this kind of ground-up growth that investors, landlords, and workers alike are desperately looking for. In addition to leasing in San Francisco, Hightouch has taken an office in New York and is expanding its footprint in Austin, London, and Southeast Asia. 

OpenAI and Anthropic get the headlines. But the more telling story of the AI boom may be the quieter tier beneath them — vertical specialists like Hightouch in marketing, Harvey in legal, and Abridge in healthcare, which are building AI products shaped around specific problems those industries face. Those companies are hungry for more office space and talent. 

“SaaS revenue is not going anywhere,” Gupta said. “There just needs to be a true AI solution at the center of it moving forward.” 

That solution, in Hightouch’s case, is a platform that sits atop a client company’s data and marketing operations. Hightouch uses AI to analyze customer information that companies already collect and can, through automated agents, push out entire marketing campaigns, including original content. 

“Imagine never having to check a dashboard again,” Gupta said. Instead, AI is used to monitor companies’ metrics and alert decision-makers of notable trends and recommend responses. 

Hightouch’s product was shaped by its customers, primarily chief marketing officers, Gupta said, and didn’t emerge from a cost-cutting mandate but from those who want to sell more effectively. Unlike off-the-shelf AI tools that fail to align with the company’s customers or voice, Hightouch plugs directly into a client’s existing data infrastructure.

“The biggest complaint against [AI-generated content] is that it is not on brand with your company,” Gupta said. “It should feel like it was made by a real human being.” 

Today, customers like Spotify, DoorDash, Aritzia, and DraftKings run parts of their marketing operations on Hightouch — paying not by the number of users, as in the SaaS boom of the 2010s, but by the number of campaigns run.

Hightouch hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue this year; a quarter of that business comes from Europe. While the company won’t be profitable in the next two years, it is using this window to perfect its offerings.

“Product first,” Gupta said. “Monetize after.”

While the SaaSpocalypse has claimed real casualties across enterprise software — see the stock prices of Salesforce (opens in new tab), ServiceNow (opens in new tab), Figma (opens in new tab), or Workday (opens in new tab) — Gupta’s argument is that SaaS is not dying, but the companies failing to evolve are. 

“Try to work at places that are still innovating,” Gupta said, when asked for his advice to tech workers. “If the company is sleepy on that front, there will be layoffs.” 

Hightouch’s founding story is a product of this moment. Gupta, 30; co-CEO Tejas Manohar, 26; and CTO Josh Curl, 31, met in 2018 and launched their company from a hacker house in the Mission. The trio were still in college during the height of the 2010s SaaS boom and arrived in San Francisco in what seemed like the post-Gold Rush, stepping into a startup environment already fat on nine-figure valuations.

“We yearned for that era when everything was more open-invite,” Gupta said. “Everything has skewed toward making money now.” 

Not everything at Hightouch is about scale. At the previous office on Folsom Street, the founders hosted board-game nights — a small, deliberate attempt to build community on their own terms, away from the transactional nature of startup culture: no investors, no pitches, no expectations. 

The new office on Montgomery Street was built with that spirit in mind. High ceilings and an open floor plan hold up to 150 people. A foosball and ping-pong table are at the center, surrounded by new furniture shipped from Wayfair and assembled by TaskRabbit contractors. Gupta has plans to use the space as a new community for techies, with volunteer events and holiday parties for startups too small to host their own. 

So as giants such as Salesforce or Meta shed workers and office space, it’s the likes of Hightouch that are hiring engineers, marketing professionals, and salespeople — the very jobs that everyone assumes AI is automating out of existence. 

The SaaSpocalypse, if Gupta is right, was never about the end of a story. 

Companies are still looking for software that can enhance their businesses. They’re just no longer willing to pay for the kind that can’t think. 

“One day,” he said, “it’d be nice to have our own Salesforce Tower.”