HubSpot

Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah met at MIT and started HubSpot in 2006 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a thesis: cold calls and paid ads were working less and less, while blogs, search engines and social media let customers find the company themselves. They called it inbound marketing, published the book of the same name in 2009 and practised what they preached; HubSpot's own blog and the free courses of HubSpot Academy were for years its most important sales channel.

The product grew from a blogging tool into a platform of "hubs" for marketing, sales, customer service and web publishing, all built around a CRM that went free in 2014, the same year as the IPO. The model is freemium at scale: small companies come in for nothing and pay as they grow. Halligan stepped down as CEO in 2021 after a snowmobile accident, and in 2024 Google was reported to be weighing an acquisition that never materialised.