HubSpot customer growth soars as multi-hub adoption becomes the norm. But Wall Street's still lashing out with its 'SaaSpocalypse' sulk...

HubSpot turned in some strong Q4 and full year numbers. Revenue came in at $846.7 million, a 20% increase year-on-year while net income $54.4 million was in stark contrast to the $4 million reported a year ago. Subscription revenue was up 21% to $829 million. For the full year, total revenue was $3.13 billion, up 19%, while net income was $45.9 million, up from $4.6 million.

All good, yes? So obviously Wall Street had a hissy fit and gave the share price a spanking!

In the wake of the so-called ‘SaaSpocalypse’, still clinging to the soles of the software industry like so much fetid ideological dog mess, good numbers from a software firm does not apparently fit the prevailing narrative and it’s probably just as well to give its stock price a beating to be on the safe side. You know it makes sense! Mine’s a Jack D and Coke, cheers!

Unfortunately the good news keeps on coming when you look closer at the figures HubSpot turned in. As of calendar year end 2025, total customers had reached 288,706, up 16% from 2024, with 9,800 net new customers added in Q4.

And they’re spending more. In 2025, deals over $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue grew 33%, and deals over $10,000 grew 41%. The number of customers with 500 or more seats grew fivefold. CEO Yamini Rangan picked out a few examples:

Rentokil Initial, a global leader in pest control, used Marketing Hub to increase leads by 76% and deliver a 671% ROI. That success led them to expand HubSpot. Now they use HubSpot's Enterprise product suite across more than 100 teams to scale their go-to-market strategy. Mercantile Bank, a financial institution with over 700 employees, consolidated six separate solutions on to Marketing Hub and saw an immediate improvement in efficiency and personalization capabilities. This success prompted them to expand to Sales Hub, Service Hub and Content Hub and replace their legacy CRM, giving them a unified view of customer while lowering costs.

Multi-buys

Another trend gaining increased traction in 2025 was the propensity for customers to adopt multiple HubSpot hubs, so much so that Rangan declares multi-hub adoption to be the new norm:

We saw two common patterns with new customers. They landed with Marketing and Sales Hub or with Marketing, Sales, Service, Content and Operations, five hubs operating as one go-to-market platform.

She added:

If they land with Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, then what happens is that in a few months, they begin to see the need for Data Hub, because in almost everything that you do with loop or in almost everything that you're doing with sales automation, you need better quality data, the ability to ingest more data, the ability to real-time bring data through AI prompts, and that's what Data Hub provides.

Service Hub is another one where there is a ton of cross-sell opportunity, especially with the advancements that we have made with customer agents, but also across the full platform, embedding summarization of ticket, sentiment analysis, as well as being able to respond quickly. We’re beginning to see Service Hub adoption. So the patterns are land with Marketing Hub and Sales Hub expand to Service Hub, Data Hub and content hub. And we are continuing to invest across the platform, and that is the motion that we want to continue to build.

SaaSpocalypse go! 

As for the wretched ‘SaaSpocalypse’ - has any made-up buzzword become more annoying more quickly in tech sector history? - Rangan addressed the disruption threat faced by companies like HubSpot and found it to be wanting:

In terms of disruption, there's a big difference between point solutions and platforms and that difference matters even more in the AI era. Look, in the last decade, HubSpot won as a platform because we were the source for customer data. With AI, we will win because we are the source of customer context and that matters.

AI is not a silver bullet, she added:

As I talk to customers right now, the biggest challenge we see with AI adoption, particularly in mid-market companies, is not access to more AI tools, more LLMs (Large Language Models), more agents, there are plenty of those. The biggest challenge that I see is that there is a huge gap between AI output and AI outcomes. When I say outcomes, I mean more leads, more deals, more growth. That's all our customers want to talk to us about. Mid-market companies don't care about AI for the sake of AI. They don't want to just adopt it. They care about driving growth and if AI can help with that, they will adopt it.

In order for AI and agents to drive outcomes, you need customer context. This is the context that was in the heads of people, but now you need [to see] the patterns of what works, what doesn't work in your business, in your industry, in your particular function, and then you need to be able to take an action on it. That is what a platform like HubSpot delivers.

She cited a practical example to back up her point:

You can ask an LLM to generate outreach for prospects and then do the same thing in the platform with a history of interactions, with the prioritization of what Sales cares about, with how your best reps handle competitive objections within your industry, and then ask it to generate outreach. The difference is, one will be AI output and the other will be AI outcomes. One produces words, the other wins deals. One knows a lot about the external world - the platform knows specifically about the customers' world and what is happening today.

There's this whole idea that AI is like a magic wand and you can attract away all of this problem and expect agents to work. It just will not. Context has to come from somewhere. It has to be trusted, it needs to be real-time and it needs to be actionable, and that is what a platform like HubSpot delivers.

HubSpot’s strategy is to be what Rangan calls “that intelligent system of customer context”, explaining:

We have the data, but more importantly, we have the business context, the industry context and the domain context to deliver it. That’s why customers come to us. They rely on us for that context, they want to use more of our APIs, and partners want to customize and build on top of us. And as AI adoption accelerates, the value of our agentic platform increases.

But even if the collective ‘Salem syndrome’ hysteria on Wall Street last week is set aside, isn’t there a risk that all the data just be completely sucked out by AI so that there is no value captured by SaaS? Rangan demurs:

Well, first of all, that assumes that we will not build agents rapidly ourselves. We are building agents on top of that customer context, and it is working, and we're seeing that adoption. Second, it assumes that SaaS platforms are [just] data. SaaS platforms are more than data. It is the logic, right? You can certainly get a non-deterministic output for a sales email, but try taking a non-deterministic output for your sales forecast. That is not possible. IT workflows, like forecasting, routing approvals, permission, that is logic; it’s not data to be sucked away.

My take

Ownership, accountability and governance, all of these live inside applications, and it's much easier to bring AI into these applications rather than try to extract all of this away as like as if it's just data. It is not.

I fear Rangan, correct though she is, is shouting into the wilderness at present with the red braces brigade on Wall Street hellbent on a warped thesis that has fired up what passes for their short termist imaginations. This too will pass, surely? There will be something else to panic about before too long.

In the meantime, HubSpot - in common with the rest of the software and SaaS sectors - needs to keep on keeping on until the next shiny silver ball trundles past to distract them. 

Onwards!