HubSpot Acquires Clearbit: A Strategic Move to Elevate Its AI Platform

HubSpot, the distinguished marketing software maker headquartered in Boston, announced its acquisition of the B2B data provider Clearbit, a significant stride to augment its AI platform with vast third-party company data encompassing millions of businesses. This deal not only brings Clearbit’s over 400,000 users and 1,500+ business customers to HubSpot but also sets the stage for the amalgamation of the two platforms, aimed at furnishing HubSpot’s customer base with enriched data and actionable insights.

Founded in 2015, Clearbit commenced its journey as a tool for users to track down email addresses associated with a company along with employee information. Over the years, it evolved into a more holistic suite of tools catering to sales, marketing, and operational teams. Clearbit’s integrations with CRM providers like HubSpot and Salesforce, and its technology to enrich a company’s leads, contacts, and accounts with additional data, have been notable. More recently, the firm dived into leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to morph unstructured data into standardized datasets for B2B teams, a technological leap that Clearbit's co-founder and CEO, Matt Sornson, believes will disrupt the data industry.

The acquisition comes as a natural progression given Clearbit’s existing relationship with HubSpot, where it has been available to its customers as part of the HubSpot App Marketplace since 2019. Post-acquisition, Clearbit will function as a HubSpot subsidiary and will gradually integrate into its customer platform. The collaboration is foreseen to resolve the persisting challenges around analyzing and utilizing company data. By fusing Clearbit’s data with HubSpot’s platform, companies could enrich their internal customer data with more real-time external context, said Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot.

Clearbit, having raised $17 million to date and valued at $250 million as of January 2019, has always believed in the potency of data for B2B go-to-market teams. “By joining forces with HubSpot, the industry’s most loved B2B customer platform, we will unlock a whole new level of value for our customers and help all of B2B grow better,” noted Sornson.