HubSpot, Inc. (HUBS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us to the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference. My name is Elizabeth Porter. I'm an analyst on the U.S. Software Equity Research team. And I'm really excited to have with us today HubSpot CEO, Yamini Rangan, .

Elizabeth, thank you for having me. Good to be here. .

Great. So we are going to take audience Q&A at the end, so mics will go around. And before we start, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/research disclosures. And with that, thanks, everyone, for joining us. . So Yamini, I think it'd be great to start off the conversation with getting your view on just what's happening in the macro demand environment? I think when we exited 2024, we looked at indicators like small business sentiment in the U.S. got really excited. I know that there's tariff trade war headlines going on now that certainly increased the volatility. So what are you seeing today in the macro demand environment? And what's your initial outlook for 2025 .

Yes. I think I would say, broadly, the demand environment for us has been stable. And if I characterize the small, medium business segment. Starting September, we've had more growth conversations, conversations about growth initiatives with our customers than before. Now having said that, broadly, our customer base tends to be very value focused. They still tend to be very focused on consolidating their tech stack on fewer platforms. We happen to be a beneficiary of that move. And they're beginning to kind of like experiment with AI, but broadly, the trends are stable. Now I say that as I read daily updates on tariffs and some trade war that's starting. So I'd say that it is a volatile environment, but the environment so far has been stable.

Great. And one of the other things that has been stable to accelerating is your pace of innovation -- and we saw just last fall at your INBOUND conference, the announcement of the Breeze platform. And across that platform, you have things like copilots, you have agents, you have features that you're integrating into the product. And it would be great to get your view on just the longer-term vision that you have for agents and really what differentiates the HubSpot agent versus what seems to be a very crowded marketplace.

Lots of agents out there. So I'll step back and say this whole trend is a decade long plus trend. We definitely see Software-as-a-Service kind of moving into results as a service, which is what AI enables. And our strategy from almost the minute we saw chat GPT come into the world has been, we want one single product, which is an AI-first customer platform. That has been a strategy. We believe that nobody should be buying an AI SKU versus a non-AI SKU. There should be one SKU, one product, which is an AI-first product. And therefore, our strategy has been to build AI into every hub and every part of the platform. Over the last two years, we have launched more than 100 features that are embedded within parts of the hubs. We have launched a copilot that assists all front office teams in leveraging HubSpot with AI, and we launched a series of agents last year at INBOUND, the Breeze agents are prospecting agent, customer agent, social and content agent. And we have an innovation bet in an agent marketplace where we are thriving -- creating like a thriving ecosystem for agent builders. So our strategy kind of has been across all of our platform. Now having said that, you asked a question how do you differentiate yourself? . We think about this, and we feel like we have 3 unique value proposition to offer, which is why we think we'll win within the agentic future. The first is data. HubSpot has always been great at bringing structured data together for our customers. Structured data is who is your customer? What's the contact, what is the conversation that you've had. We've always been great at bringing structured data. Now we see the opportunity to bring structured and unstructured data, unstructured data in e-mails, in slacks, in conversations you have, in Zoom meetings. We're bringing all of that and we are simplifying it to build the data fabric for small and medium businesses. That's unique to us. We have nearly 1.8 million CRM users that are using our product on every single day, which means there's a vast amount of structured and unstructured data that they can bring. Second reason we'll win is because we have the context and we're building a context layer on top of that data layer. What does that mean? If you are onboarding a new employee, you provide context to that employee, that employee should know what are your products, what's the value proposition of the product? What is the tone, what's the voice, who is your ideal customer? All of that is how you onboard your employees, agents and copilots and features need to be onboarded, and we're building a context layer. We acquired this company called Frame, and that technology allows us to look at structured and unstructured data and build that context for every single company, which is their brand, their voice, their ideal customer profile, the value proposition. So that's unique in how we build it, and you've got to have a platform to be able to do it. The third is really the platform-centric approach. HubSpot has won not because we've had individual hubs. We have actually won because we have a platform layer that provides primitives, that provides very clear ways in which the hubs can manifest the features. And so we have an AI intelligence platform layer with skills, with governance, with trust, with security, with permissioning built into it, and that enables our agents to kind of have the context across the whole journey and build on top of that data. So I think we're going to win because of the data layer because of the context layer and because of the platform-centric approach that we bring to small and medium customers.

Great. And I really think that we're starting to see this differentiation play out with the fact that 2/3 of your enterprise customers and over half of your Pro-customers are engaging with the AI today. And I wanted to ask, just given we've seen some of the early indicators of AI features driving more customer engagement, how do you think about monetizing all of this innovation? And what's the time line for transitioning from delivering value to monetizing these AI features?

Yes. So maybe I'll take a step back. When our strategy from a product is to have one single product which is an AI-powered customer platform, which we are monetizing today. By embedding all of our hubs with features, we are actually accelerating the acquisition of the platform. So if you asked us how you monetizing. We have one product and every hub and every part of the platform has AI features. And the way we see that translate into monetizing is we see better attach rates of Content Hub. We launched Content Hub last year. It is an AI-first hub. All of the features that they launched last year are AI features, and we've seen the attach rate of Content Hub to Marketing Hub, grow threefold. It was 13% at the beginning of the year. The end of the year was 54%. So we've seen the attach rate of hubs like Content Hub increase. Service Hub, also another AI-first hub, where we have launched a whole array of AI features, and we have continued to see increase in Service Hub adoption across our entire customer base, same thing with Sales Hub. So we're already seeing monetization because we have one single product, which is all embedded within AI, and we'll continue to see improvements in attach rates, improvements in upgrade rates and a faster pace of acquisition. Now having said that, there is this whole set of agents that we launched, and I talked about this. We launched 4 Breeze agents. And when those agents add consistent value and it is driving value for a larger base of our customers. Then we will layer in, in addition to the seats pricing model, we layer in a usage or credit-based mechanism to monetize the agents. Like I would say that early innings of this agentic kind of future our first set of agents are beginning to drive value, but it's for a smaller base of customers. And so this year, we're really focused on making sure that the agents scale and can drive predictable value. And when it does, we see a future of hybrid pricing, one with seats as well as usage or credit-based monetization happening.

Great. And with these agents, I think a really interesting concept is -- they're getting more specialized. You can find the right agent to do the right task for your specific team. It's almost like hiring an employee for your team. And Dharmesh kind of taking this view and worked on what you mentioned as the agent AI platform. And so it's kind of like a professional network for AI agent? And you referenced it just a base of users on AI agent platform has massively grown from about 50,000 at INBOUND to over 900,000 in your most recent call. So it'd be great to better understand what's the vision for AI agent? And how is it going to contribute to the HubSpot platform?

Yes. I think that's a great question. We're very happy with the momentum that we have with the agent to AI, which Dharmesh is spearheading, but maybe to provide context, if you think about HubSpot, we've always built best-in-class hubs like Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, but we also had a thriving ecosystem where others build apps on top of HubSpot and offer it to the joint customer base of small and medium businesses. . And that's the same ecosystem playbook that we are now applying to agents. We certainly want to create, and we've already launched a handful of best-in-class agents that I talked about. And we also want a vibrant ecosystem of agent builders that are building on top of HubSpot in the marketplace and able to leverage the HubSpot data within our platform. And so we launched Agent.Ai at INBOUND. At that time, we had about 50,000 users. And right now, it's close to 900,000 users. So it has grown tremendously in terms of the number of users -- and what our vision is, is to make it easy for builders to leverage platform and build agents. And the kinds of agents that we now have, we have hundreds of agents built by agent builders. It's all the way super simple things from researching a company or generating an image to multistep agents that can actually look at your campaigns to. Hopefully, an agent that can call other agents, which is really the broader vision. So that's why you mentioned the word network of agents, which in the future, we think that agents can call other agents. So our broad strategy is build best-in-class agents that we know every customer will need and also create a thriving ecosystem for builders to experiment build with. So that if you have a small and medium business, you should be coming to HubSpot and either adopting our first-party created agent or something that is built by one of our partners.

And a part of the Breeze platform that we haven't touched on yet is Breeze Intelligence. And that was built with the acquisition that you guys did from Clearbit. Really, it opened up your exposure to the TAM in the data market, which is a multibillion-dollar TAM. And clearly, there are some natural adjacencies to that market next to the CRM. So I first wanted to ask just can you talk about the near-term demand trends that you're seeing for Breeze Intelligence and then second, how do you expect capabilities for Breeze Intelligence to evolve?

Yes. Yes. So great question. I think maybe I'll start with the vision that we have for enriched data. I talked about how we differentiate in providing agents. It starts with great data. It starts with great company data, but it also starts with great intent data. So our vision is to provide the best data about customers to our customers, right? That is really the vision that we have in terms of Breeze Intelligence. And if we think about the 3 core use cases of Breeze Intelligence, the first one is helping marketers get better data about prospects so that they can run better campaigns. And typically, you have an ideal customer profile and Breeze Intelligence can help you identify hundreds, thousands of customers that are similar to that ideal customer profile. That's kind of use case, number one, identify better prospects and customers for your product. The second is, once you've identified the ideal customers within your prospect base, do they have the intent to purchase your product and typically, the intent signals are did they visit your website, did they ask questions about you in a community. Did they try your free product. Those are all intent signals. And so Breeze Intelligence allows us to be able to capture that intent signal. And the third is once that intent signal is clear if someone visits your website, can you convert them faster because you now have enough information about them. And typically, a lot of people leave by half when they complete a form, they don't want to fill out all of the fields. And so can you do it better. So those are the data use cases that we want to be able to drive, and that's our broader vision in terms of Breeze Intelligence. Now we launched Breeze Intelligence. It went into GA end of January. So it's been 4 weeks. So very, very early days. And the patterns of customer adoption are pretty similar to our hypothesis. So a lot of customer adoption in marketing by campaign managers, folks that are designing channel mix for their customers and early use cases are all kind of in the marketing use case. And so we have a lot more to build and a lot more to deliver to our customers, but very excited about the vision of including enrich data within the CRM.

Great. And you referenced earlier that we're going to see an evolution of the pricing structure. It's going to be some seats. It's going to be some consumption -- and you did recently move to more of a seat-based pricing model across all the tiers.

Yes.

And so I wanted to better understand what the strategic rationale was for the pricing change now. And what are the opportunities that it fundamentally opens up for HubSpot?

Yes, it's a great question. So it's been about a year since we changed the pricing model and introduced a few changes to the pricing model, I should say. Last March, we introduced this, and there were 3 key changes. The first one is we lowered the price per seat. And clearly, that was for us to acquire more customers. So the rationale was if you lower the seat price, we actually can grab more market share, and we certainly think we're in the early innings of building market share momentum, and that was change number one. The second one is we lowered price minimum. So our pro and enterprise tier of our product had seat minimums and that created a friction for customers to upgrade into higher tiers, and we wanted to remove that friction. So we removed the friction, and now we are benefiting from customers buying exactly what they want and then upgrading to additional seats. And so we're seeing the benefit of that second change. The third one is we introduced a core seat. For many years, we've had CRM, which is we call it a smart CRM, and that CRM component has added tremendous value to our customers. And so what we introduced as a change last year was that you can view it. But if you need to edit that CRM and edit the record within the CRM, then you need to pay. And so that was the third change that we did. So stepping back, why did we make the price change and what are we seeing as benefits. We did the price change to lower friction for our customers and have them start with HubSpot and grow with HubSpot without friction and that is exactly what we are seeing. Last year, we obviously had a bit of an ASP drop. And this year, we're benefiting from seat upgrades. This year, in addition to kind of new customers going through the pricing model, we'll have our installed base of customers go through that pricing model that will start this year, but it will also continue into next year. And as they migrate into the new pricing model, then will also increase up to a 5% for the installed base of customers. Overall, we think super early stages everything that we do from a pricing is to increase the market share acceleration and provide value to our customers, and it's very consistent with our pricing strategy.

In addition to being able to see customers expand in the new model by adding more seats, there's also opportunity to expand by taking more hubs, taking more functionality. And you referenced the Frame AI acquisition, you've seen Cacheflow as another acquisition. So I wanted to better understand how you're thinking about the M&A strategy. You guys have been very organic builders. So kind of what are the frameworks in this decision?

Yes. I mean we plan to be organic crafters of a product. I think for -- if you think about small, medium businesses, they either had to assemble a set of point solutions or they had to take like enterprise-class solutions to be able to grow. And both of those not great options. And that's why our value proposition of being super easy, getting fast time to value and having a unified crafted customer experience has been really important for that segment. So we plan to deliver a crafted customer experience for our customers. So having said that, our M&A strategy is mostly to look for great tech and great talent that can accelerate portions of our road map. And so when we acquired Clearbit, which you mentioned or Cacheflow that you mentioned, the first thing that we do is we re-write that technology onto our platform so that we can deliver a very cohesive experience to customers. With Cacheflow, they provide CPQ. And we are taking that CPQ functionality natively building it within the HubSpot platform, so our customers can have a great experience with Clearbit. It was an acquisition of data and data enrichment, and that's exactly what we are building into Breeze Intelligence. So our M&A, we think of our philosophy as very Apple-esque. We will acquire tech, we will acquire talent, but we will maintain the integrity of a cohesive customer experience.

And I want to switch a little bit over to the financials -- for your operating margin guidance, you did about 18% for fiscal '25, which puts HubSpot well on the path to reach 20% to 22% targets in fiscal '27. And I'd note that you're 18% in fiscal '25 probably would have been closer to 20% already if it wasn't for FX and the company increasing the match to their employees 401k . So as we look forward, what are some of the operational levers you're planning to use to achieve the 20% to 22% target by fiscal '27? And particularly, how are you balancing the margin expansion with all of the potential investments that you could do behind AI capabilities, just given the innovation and momentum in that market.

Yes. It's a great question, Elizabeth. So I'd say maybe starting with principals, we are really focused on balancing growth and efficiency as we continue to grow and scale. So you'll see us look at both. Now it might not be linear. So every year, it's not a linear change in operating margin, but we are very committed to the short-term targets as well as the term and longer-term targets that we have shared with you in terms of operating margin. Now the second point I would make is that if you look at the last few years, we've had multiple levers to drive margin. We improved COGS, and that was part of driving the gross margin that then shows up in operating margin. We've made our support and services team much more efficient. That drove margins, partner commissions, the change that we made in partner commissions drove the margin. So in any given year, there are multiple initiatives, multiple projects that drive efficiency. Now as we think about the future, we do think that AI is a really good lever to drive efficiency as much as we have innovated with the product in -- with AI. We've also been experimenting and reimagining our own internal go-to-market teams with AI. Now that's not a 1-year benefit. It is a multiyear arc of benefit. Our support has significantly improved in terms of efficiency, 35% of our support tickets are being resolved by AI, and we have a path to get it to 50% this year. Our marketing has gotten much more efficient with the use of AI. We're able to drive better personalization of content and conversion of demand with AI, and that drives some amount of leverage. And we have continued to kind of experiment in prospecting use cases that drive leverage. So last quarter, Q4, we had 10,000 meetings that were set up purely by AI, and we're beginning to see efficiency from a prospecting perspective. I share all of those as examples, the way we think about driving efficiency is continue to experiment with AI and continue to improve our overall sales and marketing leverage over the next few years.

Great. And seeing some of those use cases internally gives you that much more confidence half of your clients.

Absolutely. I mean, of course, we like the efficiency benefit. But even more than that, it is finding signal finding use cases that are driving value, being the best user of HubSpot software and the first user of HubSpot software and then educating and inspiring our customers. So there's even more value in becoming like really innovative with AI internally.

Great. I'm going to ask another question and then open up to the audience to see if there is any. One of the things you just referenced was the partner commission changes. And so that was announced back in 2023, but it wasn't going into effect until early this year. And as some of the things like the payouts, on the lifetime commissions and should we see that as a tailwind to margins? And if so, what's the -- how do you think about letting that flow through or reinvesting back into the partner network to drive growth?

Great question. So maybe to give context, we have a thriving partner ecosystem of solution partners, and we have nearly 6,500 solution partners within the ecosystem. We used to have lifetime commissions. And in 2023, we announced that those would be a 3-year period for new deals. And that actually started Elizabeth in 2023. So in 2023, if a partner brought in new deal than it was for a 3-year period. So some of the effect is already there. And this year, you're absolutely right for existing partners that had existing deals that they brought in. If they continue to have conversations with customers, they will continue to get commissions that, they're not having conversations with customers, we're not going to pay the commissions. And it feels almost like logical. And so we've given a lot of time for our partner ecosystem to adjust to the change. They've known this is coming and they've actually implemented that over the last 2 years. So that's the change. And more philosophically, we want to invest in growth-oriented partners. If partners are having great conversations with our customers, they're engaging customers, if they're driving multi-hub adoption, if they're driving retention of customers, we're going to invest in those types of growth partners. And as you said, part of the change was to take the commissions from some of these lifestyle partners and invest in growth partners. And we had our ecosystem kickoff last week. And we announced a set of investments to drive co-marketing with HubSpot to drive acceleration in AI readiness and to drive overall scale within the partner ecosystem. So we're investing heavily to help our partner ecosystem really leverage the larger opportunity, both with AI as well as upmarket.

Do we have any questions from the audience? I think we have one up here in the front. Mic will be here .

First off, thanks so much for coming out here, Yamini. This has been great to hear you talk a lot about HubSpot and a lot of the AI efforts, I'd love to double-click a little bit on the point that you raised about transitioning from Software-as-a-Service to results as a service. and the importance with these agents of providing value . And I'd love to double-click on that last part about driving consistent value. How do you evaluate these AI agents -- and I guess when it -- and kind of in the context of shifting from the seat-based consumption and usage base, like what does success look like? And how do you measure that these agents are successfully driving value.

Yes, great question. I think it's like 2 parts. How do you think about value creation with agents and then how do you think about layering monetization of that value creation with agents. So I'll take the first part, which is how can agents add value. Simplistically, agents are basically software that can complete tasks or multiple step task or call other agents to complete test. That's the simplest definition of agent. And we've launched 4 agents at INBOUND customer agent, prospecting, social and content agent. Now customer agents went into general availability earlier this year. We have a cohort of 1,500 early adopter customers on customer agent. And within those 1,500 customers, we are seeing an average resolution rate of 42%, which is great. It's just been a few weeks out, and it's like early adopters, but we're already seeing promising results in terms of ticket resolution. And now our job is to take it to hundreds and thousands of customers, but also expand the resolution rate from 40% to 50% and 60% and so on. Even within that early cohort, we're seeing customers that get to 60% of resolution rate, if they have great data, great documentation, great knowledge base and good history. So that customer agent is an example of how you begin to create value, and we are seeing green shoots of delivering that value. The second is content agent. Again, early days, but 30% of content created by customers is through that agent, which means there is value, there's early value. Again, we'd like to see more customers adopt content agent and also drive much more usage of content creation through that agent. So at least in the 4 agents that we have launched, they're on the path to general availability. When they get to general availability, they are early adopters adopting the technology and beginning to get value. The question then becomes how do we provide that value at scale, not just for 1,500 customers, but for thousands and hundreds of thousands of customers. That's really the focus for us this year. Almost everybody within the product and engineering organization, they're fine tune to drive that repeat value and repeat usage for our customers that are now exploring the agentic technology. I think it's a very good start, but a lot more work to be done, not just by HubSpot, but by the industry to drive the type of results that we know that agentic workflows can deliver. Having said that, how do we think about monetizing. I think we already have a core way of monetizing, which is by hub and by seat. And I think that will continue to be there. You think about Chat GPT, which is 1 of the most used, most popular AI. It's driven by seats and there's like tiers of functionality. And if you want the operator, you need a Pro plus if you want some other functionality, you need like a lower tier. And so I do think that the seats model is not going to go away. The seats and tier pricing will continue to exist. Having said that, if agents begin to be the primary way in which customers get work done, then there will be a usage-based component, and we clearly see that there is a usage-based component that will be added. And that will be based on the value that we deliver. So if we can deliver a ton of value on a consistent basis, then we'll use a credit mechanism to overlay on top of the seat mechanism and that will drive a level of consumption and usage-based monetization. So I think it's hybrid. And I think the more value that we deliver with agents, the more usage we can drive, and that's going to create a tailwind. The one thing I would say is that this is -- AI is a shift that's a decade-plus shift. And we are literally in the first innings of a very long game. And we think about how do we win with AI. And I think early stages of a technology shift, you really have to be obsessed about value creation. And if we can really deliver the value to customers and there's more software in the world, not less, then we are going to be able to monetize and we're going to be able to win within the whole cycle. So our focus is who's our customer? What's the value? How do we deliver repeated value and make AI a necessary part of their workflow.

Great. I think we have just a minute left. So to wrap up, one of the next catalysts that we have to look forward to with HubSpot is your spring spotlight in April and then that will be followed by INBOUND in September. What are some of the new capabilities and exciting things that we should be keeping an eye out, look for.

I mean Elizabeth, so you know, you've followed us for a while. We had this one big event, which was called INBOUND. The pace of our product innovation increased so much that consistently, our customers would tell us that I didn't know that you already had this functionality or I didn't know you already launched this. So because of our pace of product innovation, we created 2 big events. And so we have a spring spotlight that we launched last year in April, and we're going to continue to do that. And again, this spring spotlight is going to be in New York, and we're getting like super excited. I mean you can expect more agents, you can expect more AI-powered features and a lot more innovation within kind of the core platform or teams are laser-focused on that. So going to be an exciting launch.

Awesome. Thank you so much. for joining us today. We're really looking forward to everything in 2025.

Thanks a lot for having me. Thanks a lot.