HubSpot, a CRM platform and marketing software maker based in Boston, will purchase B2B data provider Clearbit to enhance its platform with third-party firm data that spans millions of organizations. The agreement also gives HubSpot access to Clearbit’s more than 400,000 users and 1,500 company clients. Eventually, the two systems will merge to provide HubSpot’s clientele with more data and insightful analysis.
When Clearbit was first established in 2015, its purpose was to assist users in locating email addresses linked to businesses, together with employee data such as name, position, and other specifics, such as social network profiles. The concept was for companies to use this data to validate their sales and gain a better understanding of their leads. Among the startup’s initial investors were SV Angel and First Round Capital.
Over time, Clearbit expanded into a more comprehensive set of tools for sales, marketing, and operations teams. These features included connections with CRM (customer relationship management) services like HubSpot and Salesforce. It also provided technology to add extra data to a business’s leads, contacts, and accounts, including private corporate data and publicly available online data from company websites and crowdsourcing data. It started using LLM (extended language model) technology to create standardized datasets for B2B teams out of unstructured data more recently.
“Large language models and generative AI are the step changes in technology that we are using to deliver on our promise to customers,” Clarbit co-founder and CEO Matt Sornson stated earlier this year. In addition to announcing that the Clearbit data pipeline had been redesigned with LLMs at its center, he said in a blog post, “I am confident that LLMs will completely disrupt the data industry within 18 months, but they will disrupt entire industries over the coming years.”
He said that Clearbit could now detect and enrich any firm or contact data from any country in any language because of this technology. It was perhaps a more intriguing purchase prospect as a result.
On its website, Clearbit highlighted its partnerships with Twilio Segment, Asana, Intercom, Zenefits, Greenhouse, Chargebee, Lattice, and Frame.io and its buyer, HubSpot. In particular, Clearbit has been accessible to HubSpot users since 2019 as a component of the HubSpot App Marketplace.
After the transaction closes, HubSpot will acquire Clearbit as a subsidiary and eventually include it in its customer platform.
In response to a question about why it was considering Clearbit, HubSpot stated that while collecting and compiling corporate data has become more straightforward, there are still difficulties in interpreting and applying that data. According to Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, the company thought that by merging Clearbit’s data with HubSpot’s platform, businesses could enhance their internal customer data with more current external context.
The goal of Clearbit is to gather comprehensive and valuable information about millions of businesses. For our clients, the combination of Clearbit’s data and HubSpot’s AI-powered customer platform will be potent and successful, she said.
According to statistics from PitchBook, Clearbit has received $17 million to date, and as of January 2019, the firm was valued at $250 million. Bedrock, Battery, Cross Creek, and Zetta Venture Partners were among its Series A investors.
The terms of the deal were not immediately known. Sorenson remarks, “Clearbit has always believed that data is fundamental to the best B2B go-to-market teams.” “Through our partnership with HubSpot, the most well-liked B2B customer platform in the market, we will enable our clients to receive even more value and contribute to the overall growth of the B2B space.”
