HubSpot picks up B2B data provider Clearbit to enhance its AI platform

HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software maker and CRM platform, announced today it’s acquiring the B2B data provider Clearbit to enhance its platform with third-party company data spanning millions of businesses. The deal also brings Clearbit’s over 400,0000 users and 1,500+ business customers to HubSpot and will eventually see the two platforms combine in order to provide HubSpot’s customer base with expanded data plus actionable insights.

Founded in 2015, Clearbit began as a tool that would help users hunt down email addresses associated with a company, as well as employee information like their name, job title and other details, like social media accounts. The idea was that this information would help companies better understand their leads and vet their sales. SV Angel and First Round Capital were among the startup’s first backers.

Over the years that followed, Clearbit developed into a fuller suite of tools, including those targeted toward sales, marketing and ops teams, which included integrations with CRM (customer relationship management) providers like HubSpot and Salesforce. It also offered technology to enrich a company’s leads, contacts and accounts with additional data, including public data from the web — like company websites and crowdsourced data — as well as its own proprietary data. More recently, it began to leverage LLM (large language model) technologies to convert unstructured data into standardized datasets for B2B teams.

As Clearbit co-founder and CEO Matt Sornson explained earlier this year, “Large Language Models and Generative AI are the step changes in technology that we are using to deliver on our promise to customers. LLMs will disrupt entire industries over the coming years, but I am confident that they will completely disrupt the data industry within 18 months,” he wrote in a blog post, where he also announced that the Clearbit data pipeline had been rebuilt with LLMs at the core.

Thanks to this technology, he said, Clearbit was now able to identify and enrich any company or contact data from any country in any language. That also likely made it a more interesting acquisition target.

The company’s website touted Clearbit’s relationships with not only its acquirer HubSpot, but also other businesses like Twilio Segment, Asana, Intercom, Zenefits, Greenhouse, Chargebee, Lattice and Frame.io. With HubSpot, specifically, Clearbit has been available to its customers as part of the HubSpot App Marketplace since 2019.

Following the deal’s close, Clearbit will become a subsidiary of HubSpot and will eventually become integrated into its customer platform.

Speaking to the reasons why it was interested in Clearbit, HubSpot explained that gathering company data has gotten easier over the years, but challenges still remain around analyzing and using that data. It believed that by combining Clearbit’s data with HubSpot’s platform, companies would be able to enrich their internal customer data with more real-time external context, explained Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, in a statement.

“Clearbit has made it its mission to collect rich and useful data about millions of companies. HubSpot’s AI-powered customer platform combined with Clearbit’s data will create a powerful, winning combination for our customers,” she noted.

Clearbit had raised $17 million to date, according to data from PitchBook, which saw the startup valued at $250 million as of January 2019. Its Series A investors included Bedrock, Battery, Cross Creek and Zetta Venture Partners.

Deal terms were not immediately available.

“Clearbit has always believed that data is fundamental to the best B2B go-to-market teams,” noted Sornson in a statement. “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.”

Know more about this deal? Sarah Perez can be reached at sarahp@techcrunch.com or Signal (415) 234-3994.