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HubSpot sells software that helps businesses attract customers, sell to them, and keep them happy, all in one connected platform.
HubSpot is a software company that sells tools to businesses of all sizes—from a two-person startup to a large corporation. Its main pitch is simplicity: instead of buying five or six different programs to run marketing, sales, and customer support, a business can buy HubSpot and get everything connected in one place. It's not really selling "software" so much as a central nervous system for a company's relationship with its customers. The company makes money through subscriptions. Customers sign up for a monthly or yearly plan, usually picking a "hub" like Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, or Service Hub—the three biggest pieces of its business. About 80% of revenue comes from these subscriptions, with the rest from onboarding, training, and support services. Its customers are mostly small and midsize businesses, though it increasingly sells to bigger companies too.
Think of it as a digital front desk for a business. When a stranger visits your website, fills out a form, or opens your email, HubSpot remembers them. When a salesperson calls them later, all that context is right there. When they buy something and need help, the support team sees the same history. That's the value: one shared memory of every customer, instead of everyone keeping their own scattered notes.
HubSpot was founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, who noticed that people had stopped paying attention to traditional ads and started finding companies through Google searches and blogs. Their idea was "inbound marketing"—pull customers in with helpful content rather than push ads at them. That idea became a software product, and the company has grown steadily since, going public in 2014. More recently it has focused on becoming an "AI-powered customer platform," adding artificial intelligence features that help write emails, summarize calls, and predict which leads are worth chasing. It has also made several acquisitions to fill gaps, including Clearbit for data enrichment in 2023 and Frame AI in 2024. Revenue has been growing around 20% a year, and the company is now solidly profitable on a free cash flow basis. It spends that cash mostly on reinvesting in the business—research and development, sales, and marketing—rather than paying dividends, and it has done only modest share buybacks.
Saved answer · last researched 16 Oct 2026