Marketing software company HubSpot is announcing that it has acquired two small startups — Chime and PrepWork.
The financial terms of the deals aren’t being disclosed, but HubSpot says it’s bringing on the full Chime and PrepWork teams and moving them from Toronto and New Haven, Conn., respectively, to the company headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. And these aren’t just talent acquisitions. I spoke to Vice President of Product Strategy and Corporate Development Brad Coffey and Chief Product Officer David Cancel about the deal, and while they didn’t get too specific about their product integration plans, they did say HubSpot is going to incorporate the Chime and PrepWork services to its offerings in some form.
Chime is a Google Chrome plug-in that brings the notifications from a user’s various web apps together into a single feed. PrepWork, meanwhile, sends automated briefing emails to prepare users for upcoming meetings (with content like recent blog posts and social network profiles for whoever they’re meeting with).
Coffey argued that both apps fit into a broader theme: “An important part of inbound marketing is having these personalized conversations and enabling these personalized conversations.” Cancel said both products were used by the HubSpot team prior to the acquisition, and they help HubSpot to expand its tools beyond emails and websites.
These are the company’s third and fourth acquisitions. It was the earlier purchase of Performable that brought Cancel to the team, so he’s seen the HubSpot acquisition process from the other side, too. The thing that convinced him to join HubSpot, and that he’s looking for in acquisitions, is a fit of culture and vision.
“Product will evolve and change over time, so it’s really having the same kind of mission, the same kind of cultural values, that is the number one thing,” Cancel said.
HubSpot raised a $35 million mezzanine round last fall. Coffey said that money was intended, in part, to fund deals like this, so we can probably expect more announcements in the months to come.
