Why HubSpot acquired Clearbit

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Clearbit is a data enrichment platform that lets sales and marketing teams better target and personalize their outreach.

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Jan-Erik Asplund

Published Jan 18th, 2024

On Wednesday, HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) announced that it was acquiring data enrichment platform Clearbit and its data on 20 million companies and 500 million people.

Back in March, we interviewed the co-founder and ex-CEO of Clearbit, Matt Sornson, about Clearbit’s competitive positioning vis-a-vis HubSpot and vertically integrated sales intelligence companies like Apollo (dataset).

Key points from our interview:

Clearbit launched in 2014 as an API for business data and found product-market fit as a way for technical marketers to easily bring data into their sales & marketing automation tools to personalize their go-to-market campaigns. Prior to Clearbit, marketers bought CSVs from Zoominfo, Dun & Bradstreet or Jigsaw (acquired by Salesforce in 2010) and manually uploaded them to Salesforce—after, technical marketers used no-code and low-code tools like Zapier and Segment to pump that data into Salesforce programmatically. (link)

Meanwhile, circa 2012, the rich, flexible user model of Salesforce began to move downmarket with HubSpot, Klaviyo ($580M in ARR), Intercom ($250M revenue in 2022), Customer.io ($50M ARR) and others all enabling sales & marketing teams to enrich customer data with custom user attributes. Clearbit became the data merchant for the rising growth marketing stack that included Clearbit for the data itself, Segment and Zapier to move that data between tools, and a HubSpot as the CRM to send and manage the go-to-market campaigns. (link)