HubSpot just acquired B2B data provider Clearbit.
The publicly traded marketing software and CRM platform plans to integrate Clearbit’s external company and contact enrichment data with companies’ internal customer data.
The Clearbit acquisition puts HubSpot on track to own more of the go-to-market (GTM) tech stack — helping its customers find best-fit prospects based on internal and external data in one platform.
The acquisition also marks a near-term opportunity to go after ZoomInfo.
And it sets HubSpot up for a longer-term fight with fast-growing data intelligence and sales engagement platforms like Apollo.io and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
We dive in below.
Battling ZoomInfo
A quick look at CB Insights interview transcripts with software buyers shows that Clearbit was already battling and beating ZoomInfo in certain areas.
As this buyer highlights, vs. ZoomInfo, Clearbit was “overwhelmingly the best database for the companies we sell to.”
Add in that Clearbit was already integrating with HubSpot, this likely allowed HubSpot’s corp dev team some insight into the product’s value and usage by customers.
Read the full transcript here.
While the above comment is a signal of volume, this conversation transcript highlighted Clearbit winning over ZoomInfo because it “had a higher accuracy rate with our total addressable market.”
Read the full transcript here.
In our scorecard of data enrichment vendors based on these interviews, we see customer satisfaction (CSAT) for ZoomInfo lagging behind other players, including Clearbit.
Taking on data enrichment & sales engagement players
More broadly, HubSpot now has an additional product arrow in its quiver to capture a slice of the data enrichment and sales engagement market, which includes LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, Cognism, Lusha, and others.
It’s hard to tease out exactly how big the LI Sales Navigator business is but some data we’ve gleaned:
- In 2016, LinkedIn Premium Subscription was $155M (prior to the closing of its acquisition by Microsoft).
- The business now goes by different names so it’s hard to know exactly where Sales Navigator now sits and Microsoft disclosures on it are minimal, but we do know that LI Sales Solutions grew to $1B+ in revenue by 2021.
LI Sales Navigator has been incredibly fast-growing, big, and sticky.
HubSpot is also taking aim at Apollo. The company, which provides data enrichment and sequencing tools, raised a $100M Series D at a $1.6B valuation in August 2023 — up 78% from its 2022 valuation.
Apollo has also been growing its team rapidly compared to other companies in the space highlighting its traction especially vs. publicly traded ZoomInfo, which our software buyer transcripts consistently highlight.
Looking ahead
HubSpot’s acquisition of Clearbit points to more M&A in the space.
Here is a snapshot of still private ZoomInfo competitors from CB Insights:
Competitor context: ZoomInfo’s challenges for asset managers
These 3 firms each have $400,000,000+ invested in ZoomInfo:
- Carlyle
- Capital World Investors
- Vanguard
In addition, Blackrock has $390M and Wellington has $375M.
Image source: Nasdaq
The CB Insights software buyer interview transcripts and private market data have been highlighting for some time the competitive, product, M&A integration and pricing challenges ZoomInfo faces
On April 10th, we published a brief on the pressure ZoomInfo is facing using the quantitative and qualitative info on the CBI platform.
The market cap then was $9.3B.
It stands at $5B today.
And that’s the tip of the iceberg of ZoomInfo research and data we have (25+ pieces of proprietary insight and data as you’ll see).
If you invest in public technology companies and want a 360-degree view of what is going on in their markets, find out here.
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