PomegraHightouch has acquired Strata, a no-code AI integration startup, to widen the data its marketing agents can reach. The deal terms are undisclosed.
- Hightouch announced the Strata acquisition on October 9, 2026; financial terms were not disclosed.
- Strata CEO Kelsey Mullaney joins Hightouch to lead revenue programs and go-to-market strategy.
- Hightouch was valued at $2.75 billion after a $150 million Series D in April 2026.
Lead
Hightouch, the marketing and customer data platform valued at $2.75 billion, acquired Strata on October 9, 2026. Strata is a startup founded in 2024 whose AI agent builds and maintains custom API integrations without code. Hightouch did not disclose the price or structure. The stated purpose is to connect more of the tools marketing teams use, so Hightouch's own AI agents have the context to make better decisions.
The deal comes six months after Hightouch announced a $150 million Series D led by Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital Ventures. It reads as a strategic purchase of integration capability, with an executive hire attached, rather than a pure acquihire.
What Does Strata Actually Do?
Strata automates the building of one-off connections between marketing systems. A user tells the agent what data should move and where. The agent maps fields and events, configures transformations and generates the integration. It then keeps the connection running as the systems on either end change.
That addresses a familiar bottleneck. Marketing teams often depend on engineers to build and maintain integrations for niche tools, and those requests queue behind other work. Strata's pitch was to remove that queue.
The company was founded by Kelsey Mullaney, Julian Mclain and Ilya Brin, who met as early employees at Iterable, the marketing platform. They spent nearly a decade there helping build and scale it. Strata's funding history has not been disclosed.
Why Did Hightouch Buy an Integration Startup?
Hightouch bought Strata because an agent is only as useful as the data it can see. Hightouch describes itself as an agentic marketing platform. Its products make decisions about which customer gets which message, using reinforcement learning and other models. Every additional tool connected to the platform adds context for those decisions.
Hightouch already activates data across hundreds of marketing and business tools. The long tail is the harder part, since each specialized tool needs its own connector. Building those by hand does not scale, and Strata's agent-built approach is meant to shorten that roadmap and make customer onboarding easier.
Mullaney framed the deal around reach. "Hightouch is removing the ceiling on what marketers can do," she said, adding that joining the company means getting there faster, for far more marketers.
How Large Is Hightouch Now?
Hightouch reported $100 million in annual recurring revenue in April 2026. It added $70 million of that after introducing its AI product about 20 months earlier. At the time, the company had roughly 380 employees and named customers including Domino's, Chime, PetSmart and Spotify. Tejas Manohar and Kashish Gupta serve as co-CEOs.
The valuation path is steep. The company was valued at $1.2 billion in February 2025, when it raised an $80 million Series C led by Sapphire Ventures. The April 2026 Series D more than doubled that figure, to $2.75 billion. Other Series D participants included Amplify Partners, ICONIQ Capital, Sapphire Ventures and TD7, the venture arm of The Trade Desk.
At roughly 27 times the $100 million ARR figure, the valuation assumes the AI-led growth continues. Small acquisitions like Strata are one way to defend that assumption by adding product depth without a large cash outlay. Whether the purchase was paid in cash, stock or both is unknown.
What Happens to Strata's Customers?
The announcement leaves Strata's existing users with open questions. Hightouch said Strata's technology will be folded into its platform. It did not say whether Strata will continue as a standalone product, on what timeline, or at what pricing.
Details on how integration definitions or credentials would be handled in a transition were also absent. Neither were approval gates or rollback procedures for agent-generated changes that write to production systems. Those are standard concerns for teams that let an agent modify live connections. Customers of independent integration tools tend to weigh them heavily after an acquisition.
What Comes Next for Agentic Marketing Platforms?
Expect more consolidation around data connectivity. Marketing platforms competing on AI decisioning need broad, current access to customer data, and building connectors is slow work. Buying small teams that have automated it is a faster route, and Strata's founders bring a decade of experience from a major marketing platform.
The risk sits in execution. Agent-built integrations must hold up as third-party APIs change, and any failure feeds bad data into automated decisions about real customers. Hightouch's next product announcements will show whether Strata's agent becomes a core feature or a quiet addition to the connector library.
Outlook
Hightouch's purchase of Strata is a small deal with a clear logic: more connected tools mean better inputs for its marketing agents. The company enters the integration build-out with $100 million in ARR, a $2.75 billion valuation and a founding team that knows the marketing stack. Undisclosed terms and unresolved customer questions leave the deal's real weight to be judged by what ships next.
