HubSpot has made its first startup investment to cover a blind spot in inbound marketing.
The Cambridge marketing tech company announced on Monday it participated in the $10.3 million Series B round as a strategic investor for Atlanta-based Terminus, which provides account-based marketing software. Company spokeswoman Ellie Botelho confirmed to me that this is the company's first investment in a startup.
"It's a meaningful step in our ongoing mission to move from being an applications company to a platform company," Botelho said of the investment.
In a Medium post, HubSpot Chief Strategy Officer Bradford Coffey wrote that account-based marketing can be a good complement to HubSpot's inbound marketing techniques in situations where more than one individual are involved in the purchasing process.
"When done poorly, [account-based marketing] can overwhelm a company with incoming messages and ads. It can resemble the spammy marketing that we all hate — and that inbound practitioners know simply don’t work," he said. "However, our customers were starting to successfully tap into the positive, personalized aspects of account-based marketing, and doing so without alienating their prospects." That eventually led to the discovery of Terminus.
"They understand that account-based marketing should be about precision and personalization not brute force," Coffey added. "That is the kind of account-based marketing we want to see spread in the industry."
Bothelho declined to say whether the investment will create opportunities for the two companies to integrate their software. However, she said, the "move is really about investing in our ecosystem," adding that HubSpot and Terminus will continue to build their partnership to bring account-based and inbound marketing to their customers.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly referred to HubSpot's investment as an acquisition in the third paragraph.
