HubSpot, Inc. provides a customer platform that helps businesses connect and grow better.
The company delivers seamless connection for customer-facing teams with a unified platform that includes three layers: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered engagement hubs, a Smart customer relationship management product (CRM), and a connected ecosystem supporting the customer platform with a marketplace of integrations, templates, expert partners, a community network, and an academy of educational conten...
HubSpot, Inc. provides a customer platform that helps businesses connect and grow better.
The company delivers seamless connection for customer-facing teams with a unified platform that includes three layers: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered engagement hubs, a Smart customer relationship management product (CRM), and a connected ecosystem supporting the customer platform with a marketplace of integrations, templates, expert partners, a community network, and an academy of educational content.
The company’s AI-powered engagement Hubs include Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations, Content and Commerce that enable companies to attract, engage, and delight customers throughout the customer lifecycle. The Smart CRM is the foundational layer that combines customer data with AI to power the entire customer platform with unified customer profiles and tools to manage and govern team and business processes.
The company focuses on selling to mid-market business-to-business (B2B) companies, which it defines as companies. The company primarily sells its customer platform on a subscription basis.
The HubSpot Approach
The company’s customer platform features a central database of lead and customer interactions and integrated applications designed to help businesses build their presence online, attract prospects across channels, convert prospects into leads, close leads into customers, transact with those customers, and delight them so they become promoters of those businesses.
The company’s customer platform was architected from the ground up to enable businesses to transform their marketing, sales, services, operations, commerce and content management playbook to meet the demands of customers today. The company’s customer platform includes a system of record for maintaining a unified view of the customer experience, a system of engagement for efficiently engaging customers through search engine optimization (SEO), web content, social, blogging, email, marketing automation, messaging, support ticketing, knowledge base, commerce, conversation routing, video hosting, deal progression, prospecting, data enrichment, and an end-to-end payment solution which enables customers to streamline their billing and payment process with fewer tools.
The company provides a set of integrated applications on a common platform, which offers businesses ease of use and simplicity. The company’s customer platform has one login, one user interface and one unified customer view. The company’s customer platform starts free and grows with its customers. It is designed to scale its power and technical sophistication without losing its ease-of-use. In addition to being a comprehensive suite itself, the company’s customer platform seamlessly integrates with hundreds of external applications, making it easy to extend the functionality of its customer platform and customize it for any business. This enables the company’s customers to get work done quickly, driving immediate impact.
At the core of its customer platform is a unified data platform for each business that captures its lead and customer activity throughout the customer lifecycle – this is the company’s Smart CRM. The company’s Smart CRM creates a unified timeline incorporating all the interactions across the business with a particular customer. In contrast to many CRM suites which are cobbled together, the company has crafted a set of core functionalities, including reporting, content, messaging, data, AI assistance and automation, which run across its engagement Hubs.
The company’s customer platform is designed and built to serve a large number of customers with demanding use cases. The company’s customer platform processes billions of data points each week, and it uses leading global cloud infrastructure providers and its own automation technology to dynamically allocate capacity to handle processing workloads of all sizes. The company has built its customer platform on modern, scalable distributed technologies. The company builds the infrastructure to support hundreds of microservices and can easily add new features and capabilities to the customer platform. The company utilizes a variety of open-source distributed systems, including HBase, Kafka, Vitess, and Elasticsearch to scale the company’s data collection and processing. The company’s scalability gives it flexibility for future growth and enables it to service a large variety of businesses of different sizes across different industries.
The company’s customer platform features a variety of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows easy integration of its platform with other applications. The company enables its customers to connect its platform to their other applications, such as ecommerce, event management and videoconferencing applications. By connecting third-party applications, the company’s customers can leverage its centralized database to perform additional functions and analysis.
Growth Strategy
The key elements to the company’s growth strategy are to grow its customer base; keep expanding internationally; continue to innovate and expand its customer platform; and selectively pursue acquisitions.
Customer Platform
The company’s customer platform, with engagement Hubs, its Smart CRM, and connected ecosystems enable companies to have a unified customer profile and connect with their customers at every part of their customer relationship lifecycle. Each Hub can be used standalone, with its Smart platform, a third party CRM, and/or in conjunction with any version of the other Hubs. The company’s Hubs are available in both free and paid tiers with gradually increasing levels of functionality that support the needs of its customers as their businesses grow.
Businesses that want to use software outside of the company’s customer platform can leverage its ecosystem of third-party integrations from its platform application partners to have a single, integrated stack. The company makes it easy to find and install new or existing software solutions that complement its customer platform. Over 1,700 integrations and applications are available for the company’s users, across a wide range of categories, including integrations with leading social media, email, sales, video, analytics, content and webinar tools. Customers can build custom applications and integrations on top of the company’s customer platform themselves, or through third party developers in its ecosystem.
Smart CRM: The core of the company’s customer platform is its Smart CRM: a unified data platform of lead and customer information that allows businesses to track their interactions with contacts and customers, manage their customer activities, report on their pipeline and sales, and manage and govern their team and business processes. This allows a complete view of lead and customer interactions across all of the company’s integrated Hubs, giving its customer platform substantial power. This Smart CRM makes it possible to personalize every aspect of the customer interaction across web content, social media engagement, and email messages across devices, including mobile. The integrated Hubs and Smart CRM on the company’s customer platform have a common user interface and are accessed through a single login.
Breeze: Breeze is the company’s AI that powers the customer platform, including its Smart CRM, engagement Hubs, and the connected ecosystem. Breeze includes Breeze Copilot, an AI-powered companion to boost productivity and make work easier; Breeze Agents to help teams automate work, end-to-end, from strategy to execution; and Breeze Intelligence, a data enrichment solution to provide a complete and unified view of the customer, and features across the CRM and Hubs built on Breeze.
Marketing Hub: Marketing Hub is an all-in-one toolset for marketers to attract, engage, and nurture new leads towards sales readiness over the entire customer lifecycle. Features include: marketing automation and email, social media, SEO, and reporting and analytics.
Sales Hub: Sales Hub is designed to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of sales teams. Businesses can empower their teams with tools that deliver a personalized experience for prospects with less work for sales representatives. Features include: email templates and tracking, conversations and live chat, meeting and call scheduling, lead and website visit alerts, lead scoring, sales automation, pipeline management, quoting, forecasting, and reporting.
Service Hub: Service Hub is the company’s customer service software designed to help businesses manage, respond and connect with customers. Features include conversations and live chat functionality, conversational bots, call tracking, tickets and help desk, automation and routing, knowledge base, team emails, feedback and reporting tools, and customer goals.
Content Hub: The company’s Content Hub combines the power of customer relationship management and a content management system into one integrated platform. The company’s content tools enable businesses to create new and edit existing web content while also personalizing their websites for different visitors and optimizing their websites to convert more visitors into leads and customers. Features include website pages, business blogging, video and podcast hosting, smart content, landing pages and forms, SEO recommendations, forms and lead flow, web analytics reporting, calls-to-action, and file manager.
Operations Hub: Operations Hub is designed to help businesses combine, clean, and activate customer data in a connected platform, automate business processes, eliminate time-consuming data cleanup, and query and transform data to enable customer insights and connections. Features include programmable automation, data sync, data curation, and data quality tools.
Commerce Hub: Commerce Hub is a B2B commerce suite that helps streamline the opportunity-to-cash process for businesses to get paid faster, increase revenue and save time. It includes an end-to-end payment solution, Payments, which enables customers to accept electronic funds transfers (e.g. credit card payments) from their customers in less time and with fewer tools. With Payments, the company’s customer's customer can buy and pay directly on a website, an email, or chat. Features include payment links, invoices, quotes, subscription management, automation and revenue reporting.
Services
The company complements its product offerings with customer success, support, and occasionally, professional services. The company views these as critical elements of ensuring the long-term retention of its customers. The majority of the company’s services and support is offered over email, phone, chat applications and via web meeting technology rather than in-person, which is a more efficient business model for it and its customers. The company also leverages AI to further boost this efficiency.
Customer Success: The company’s customers have access to a Customer Success Manager (CSM), Partner Development Manager (PDM) or Customer Success Team (CST) which are responsible for its customers’ long term success, retention and growth on its customer platform. Depending on the customer spend, they will either have a dedicated CSM, or be serviced by a CST in a team based approach. The company’s CSMs or CST address the unique needs and goals of its customers through a series of ongoing interactions and strategy calls on how to best use its customer platform. The company’s PDMs play a similar role as its CSMs and CST, but focus on the growth and success of its Solutions Partners. The Solutions Partner’s customers have oversight through CSM and work collaboratively with the PDM to help the Solutions Partner’s customers get the most value from its platform and the Solutions Partner’s services.
Support: In addition to assistance provided by the company’s online articles and customer discussion forums, it offers phone and/or email and chat based support, which is included in the cost of a subscription for its Hubs. Phone, email and chat support is available starting at the Professional product level for all Hubs while email and chat based support is available for Starter Hubs. The company leverages AI as a core part of its support offerings. The company strives to maintain an exceptional quality of customer service. The company continuously monitors key customer service metrics such as phone hold time, ticket response time and ticket resolution rates, and it monitors the customer satisfaction of its customer support interactions.
Professional Services: The company offers professional services to educate and train customers on how to leverage its customer platform to transform how their business attracts, engages and delights customers. The company also offers in-app training modules that customers can use as part of their on-boarding. The company’s professional services are also available to customers who need additional assistance on a one-time or ongoing basis for an additional fee. Depending on the scope of work and the services a customer needs help with, the company might recommend they work with the company’s Solutions Partner ecosystem.
Customers
As of December 31, 2024, the company had 247,939 Customers in more than 135 countries, representing many industries.
Technology
The company’s Customers have chosen it as their customer platform, which it architected and built to be secure, highly distributed and highly scalable. Since its founding, the company has embraced rapid, iterative product development lifecycles, cloud automation and open-source technologies, including big data platforms, as well as AI, to power marketing, sales, service, operations, commerce, and content management programs and provide insights not previously possible or available.
The company’s customer platform is a multi-tenant, globally available software-as-a-service delivered through APIs, web browsers or mobile applications. The company’s commitment to a highly available, reliable, and scalable platform for businesses of all sizes is accomplished through the use of these technologies.
Platform Approach: The company builds HubSpot on a single platform with reusable and composable libraries, allowing it to rapidly address new feature areas and bring new products to market that have a consistent user experience and data model. The company has built this platform with scale in mind, supporting thousands of components, including hundreds of microservices.
Modern Database Architecture: The company processes billions of data points weekly across various channels, including social media, email, SEO and website visits, and continues to drive nearly real-time analytics across these channels. This is possible because the company builds its database from the ground up using distributed big data technologies, such as HBase, Elasticsearch and Kafka to both process and analyze the large amounts of data it collects. The company also utilizes Vitess to operate MySQL at scale, allowing its engineers to choose the best datastore for each task.
Agility: The company’s infrastructure and development and software release processes allow it to update its platform for specific groups of customers or its entire customer base at any time. This means the company can rapidly innovate and deliver new functionality frequently, without waiting for quarterly or annual release cycles. The company typically deploys updates to its software platform thousands of times a day, enabling it to gather immediate customer feedback and improve its product quickly and continuously.
Cost leverage: The company’s customer platform was built on an almost exclusive footprint of open-source software and designed to operate in cloud-based data centers. As its processing volume continues to grow, the company continues to receive larger volume discounts on a per-unit basis for costs such as storage, bandwidth and computing capacity.
Scalability: By leveraging leading cloud infrastructure providers along with its automated technology stack, the company is able to scale workloads of varying sizes at any time. This allows the company to handle customers of all sizes and demands without traditional operational limitations, such as network bandwidth, computing cycles, or storage capacity as it can scale ots platform on-demand.
Reliability: ustomer data is distributed and processed across multiple data centers within a region to provide redundancy. The company builds its customer platform on a distributed computing architecture with reduced single points of failure and it operates across data center boundaries daily. In addition to datacenter level redundancy, this architecture supports multiple live copies of each data set along with snapshot capabilities for faster, point-in-time data recovery.
Security: The company leverages industry standard network and perimeter defense technologies, distributed denial-of-service, protection systems (including web application firewalls) and enterprise grade domain name system and services across multiple vendors. The company’s data-center providers operate and certify to high industry compliance levels. Due to the broad footprint of the company’s customer base, it regularly tests and evaluates its platform with trusted third-party vendors to ensure the security and integrity of its services.
Marketing and Sales
The company is a global leader in implementing an inbound experience in marketing and sales, continuously evolving its approach to align with emerging technologies including AI.
Marketing: The company’s marketing team attracts new leads and users each month through its industry-leading blog, podcast network, email newsletter and other content, AI-powered tools, large social media following, high search engine rankings and personalized website and email content. The company recognizes that AI is fundamentally changing how consumers discover and engages with content, and it is actively integrating these technological advances to enhance its marketing capabilities while maintaining the human-centric approach that defines HubSpot marketing. In addition, the company is generating leads for new and add-on product purchases through content and offers delivered through its customer platform to existing customers, optimized through machine learning and predictive analytics.
Direct Sales: The company’s sales representatives throughout the world use phone, email, web meetings, and AI-enhanced engagement tools to interact with prospects and customers. The revenue generated by its sales representatives originates with leads produced by various channels that are augmented by AI-driven lead scoring and prioritization. In addition, its freemium products and in-product cross-sell offerings, supported by intelligent recommendation systems, help close new business with little or no interaction by its sales representatives.
Channel Sales: In addition to its direct sales team, the company has sales representatives that manage relationships with its worldwide network of Solutions Partners who both use its platform for their own businesses and also, on a commissioned basis, refer customers to the company. The company is actively working with its partners to navigate the opportunities and challenges presented by AI advancement, ensuring they are equipped to deliver value in an evolving technological landscape.
History
HubSpot, Inc. was founded in 2005. The company was incorporated under the laws of the state of Delaware in 2005.
