All-in-one inbound marketing software firm HubSpot has raised $35 million in a mezzanine financing round from a large, unnamed institutional investor, Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital, and previous investors. Since its founding in 2006, HubSpot has received $100 million in investment from General Catalyst, Matrix Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Salesforce.com, Charles River Ventures, Altimeter, Cross Creek and others.
For background, HubSpot’s marketing software customers manage websites and generate leads. HubSpot has bought Performable and OneForty.
The company recently launched its most feature-rich product suite yet–HubSpot 3. The suite includes analytics, SEO, blogging strategy, advertising and more. HubSpot also added 100 net new jobs in the past year, bringing the total employee count to more than 400, and plans to add 55 more by year’s end.
For 2011, HubSpot is forecasting a $60 million run rate, which is up over 85 percent from a year ago. While the company’s valuation was not disclosed, Laura Fitton, HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Evangelist (and founder of OneForty) said that the valuation was “very good.”
HubSpot’s CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan tells us that he’d like to take the company public, but he wants to build an iconic brand, and doesn’t mind taking the time to do that. “We want to wait until we have a $100 million run rate to go public,” he said in an interview. The company is taking the proper steps in order to prepare themselves for an IPO.
For example, HubSpot just hired JD Sherman as CFO; Sherman was the previous chief financial officer at Akamai and was the chief financial executive of IBM’s $21 billion Systems and Technology Group. The new investors in the mezzanine round also invest in many publicly traded companies, and HubSpot is implementing processes to operate “as if public” in terms of staffing and internal procedures. HubSpot also announced that Ron Gill, CFO of NetSuite was appointed to its board of directors as chair of the audit committee.
“HubSpot empowers our customers to do inbound marketing right, by attracting leads using extraordinary content and then converting them using highly personalized context,” said Dharmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder. “HubSpot customers have generated more than 56 million leads since we founded the company, which is what happens when you create marketing people love.”
The new funding will be used towards hiring, acquisitions and “hitting the gas” on international growth. Specifically, the company will be making a big expansion into Europe.
Comment