HubSpot Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based provider of marketing software that helps businesses attract customers, has acquired Chime Inc., a Google Chrome-based web notification centre located in Toronto, along with another company. Financial details of the two acquisitions were not released. HubSpot is backed by a number of U.S. venture capital firms, including Google Ventures, Salesforce.com and Sequoia Capital.
As you may have seen this morning, HubSpot has acquired Chime and PrepWork, both of whom will bring great innovation and unique IP to the HubSpot team.
Below, I’ve outlined why we made these specific acquisitions and explained how we view acquisitions like these as part of our commitment to rapid growth and transforming the marketing landscape entirely.
1) Both Chime and PrepWork deliver on our vision for new ways to humanize bottom-of-the-funnel interactions.
At HubSpot, we started with a fundamental belief that the ways in which humans interact is changing rapidly as a result of technology. That vision influences both our culture and our product, which is focused on making every marketing interaction more human, personalized, and lovable. Both Chime and PrepWork have created products that make bottom-of-the-funnel interactions fundamentally more human, and that’s paramount to us as we think about the next generation of marketing and our product. Personalizing and humanizing the customer’s journey is critical to our mission, and both of these companies deliver upon that promise.
The Chime team built a Chrome plug-in that allows users to get all of their social media notifications in their browser in a user-friendly manner. PrepWork constructed a platform that syncs with your calendar to give you relevant information about people you’re meeting with. Streamlining all my notifications in one place and arming me with information about sports scores relevant to the person I’m meeting with next? That’s relevant, contextual information consumers love.
In other words, both companies were focused on personalization and solving for a customer need. That’s exciting to our team here at HubSpot, because we believe that’s what inbound marketing is all about, and we look forward to the knowledge, assets, and user feedback that both Chime and PrepWork bring to bear on our vision of creating marketing people love.
2) 1+1=3
At INBOUND 2012, we talked about how having a back end leads system and a front end web system together in HubSpot uniquely facilitates a more personalized customer journey. These two companies take an additional step forward by allowing people to have much more personalized engagement with customers, but with a true commitment to efficiency and effectiveness. The HubSpot product always helped convert strangers into prospects — then the acquisition of Performable allowed us to more effectively convert prospects into qualified leads. Now, the addition of Chime and PrepWork gives us deeper knowledge and assets to convert qualified leads into customers. Attracting, converting, engaging, and delighting customers has never been so easy because HubSpot delivers all the tools you need to personalize each interaction in one, easy-to-use interface.
Hundreds of companies email us each year about getting acquired by HubSpot, and many of them dazzle us with their technical knowledge or specific expertise in a given area. However, one of the key elements we look for — which stuck out to us about both Chime and PrepWork — was both companies’ commitment to solving for the needs of a customer and getting that interaction right. Chime has over 20,000 users in public beta as well as outstanding ratings in the Google Chrome App Store, and there’s a reason for that: The Chime team took user feedback and considerations seriously to create the right signal to noise ratio. PrepWork was founded by Dan Wolchonok and provides briefing emails relevant to forthcoming meetings via a sync with users’ calendars. Chime and PrepWork ultimately built and brought to market successful products that solved for customer needs. That dedication to the customer is core to what we do at HubSpot, and we love that both companies set out to solve for a market need and worked furiously to deliver upon it. Replacing loud, interruptive advertising with engaging and personalized marketing efforts is inherently linked to understanding how consumers live, so Chime and PrepWork align perfectly with our criteria and our notion that having all-in-one marketing software creates better engagement for customers and a more efficient approach for marketers.
3) Cultural Fit
Dharmesh and I have always taken culture seriously. So seriously, in fact, that we recently doubled down on our commitment to employee autonomy and transparency with the Culture Code deck Dharmesh presented to our company and the world two weeks ago. As a result, acquiring companies isn’t something we take lightly when it comes to cultural fit. We look for people who are incredibly smart, operate at a rapid pace, are innovative, independent thinkers, and are driven by GSD: getting stuff done. In both PrepWork and Chime, we felt fortunate to find teams who fit wonderfully into the existing culture at HubSpot, and we can’t wait for them to join us full time in June.
At HubSpot, we have a strong tradition of acquiring companies and integrating them seamlessly as contributors to our team, culture, approach, product, and customer success. Just as we have done with Performable and oneforty, we believe we’re adding some incredible rock stars to our team and are honored and excited to announce that they are now officially part of the HubSpot family.
This is an exciting step in HubSpot’s growth, and we believe we’ll have more of these announcements to share moving forward, so keep visiting us here as we continue to expand our team, our product, and our commitment to changing the world of marketing.
Source: HubSpot Inc.
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