UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

 

FORM 10-K

 

(MARK ONE)

☒	ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 31, 2023

OR

☐	TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

FOR THE TRANSITION PERIOD FROM TO

Commission File Number 001-36680

 

HubSpot, Inc.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

 

 

Delaware		20-2632791
(State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization)		(I.R.S. Employer Identification No.)

 

Two Canal Park

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02141

(Address of principal executive offices)

(888) 482-7768

(Registrant’s telephone number, including area code)

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

 

Title of each class		Trading symbol(s)		Name of each exchange on which registered
Common Stock, par value $0.001 per share		HUBS		New York Stock Exchange

 

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None.

 

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. YES ☒ NO ☐

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. YES ☐ NO ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. YES ☒ NO ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). YES ☒ NO ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act:

Large accelerated filer		☒		Accelerated filer		☐
Non-accelerated filer		☐		Smaller reporting company		☐
				Emerging growth company		☐

 

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the Registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal controls over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report YES ☒ NO ☐

If securities are registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act, indicate by check mark whether the financial statements of the registrant included in the filing reflect the correction of an error to previously issued financial statements. YES ☐ NO ☒

Indicate by check mark whether any of those error corrections are restatements that required a recovery analysis of incentive-based compensation received by any of the registrant’s executive officers during the relevant recovery period pursuant to §240.10D-1(b). YES ☐ NO ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). YES ☐ NO ☒

The aggregate market value of common stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant, based on the closing price of the registrant’s common stock on June 30, 2023, as reported by the New York Stock Exchange on such date was approximately $25,412,807,293. Shares of the registrant’s common stock held by each executive officer, director and holder of 5% or more of the outstanding common stock have been excluded in that such persons may be deemed to be affiliates. This calculation does not reflect a determination that certain persons are affiliates of the registrant for any other purpose.

On February 9, 2024, the registrant had 50,674,493 shares of common stock outstanding.

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HUBSPOT, INC.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

				Page No.
PART I
ITEM 1.		Business		7
ITEM 1A.		Risk Factors		16
ITEM 1B.		Unresolved Staff Comments		43
ITEM 1C.		Cybersecurity		43
ITEM 2.		Properties		44
ITEM 3.		Legal Proceedings		44
ITEM 4.		Mine Safety Disclosures		44
PART II
ITEM 5.		Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities		45
ITEM 6.		[Reserved]		46
ITEM 7.		Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations		47
ITEM 7A.		Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk		65
ITEM 8.		Financial Statements and Supplementary Data		66
ITEM 9.		Changes in and Disagreements with Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosures		97
ITEM 9A.		Controls and Procedures		97
ITEM 9B.		Other Information		98
ITEM 9C.		Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections		98
PART III
ITEM 10.		Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance		99
ITEM 11.		Executive Compensation		99
ITEM 12.		Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters		99
ITEM 13.		Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence		99
ITEM 14.		Principal Accounting Fees and Services		99
PART IV
ITEM 15.		Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules		100
ITEM 16.		10-K Summary		100
SIGNATURES				103

 

 

 

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SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and these statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “may,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “could,” “intends,” “target,” “projects,” “contemplates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “potential” or “continue” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions that concern our expectations, strategy, plans or intentions. Forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K include, but are not limited to, statements about:

We caution you that the foregoing list may not contain all of the forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We have based the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K primarily on our current expectations and projections about future events and trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors described in “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

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The results, events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements may not be achieved or occur, and actual results, events or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.

The forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.

We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements and you should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements. Our forward-looking statements do not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, mergers, dispositions, joint ventures, or investments we may make.

In this Annual Report on Form 10-K, the terms “HubSpot,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to HubSpot, Inc. and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

 

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Risk Factor Summary

The risk factors detailed in Item 1A entitled “Risk Factors” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the risks that we believe are material to our investors and a reader should carefully consider them. Those risks are not all of the risks we face and other factors not presently known to us or that we currently believe are immaterial may also affect our business if they occur. The following is a summary of the risk factors detailed in Item 1A:

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PART 1

ITEM I. BUSINESS

Overview

We provide a customer platform that helps businesses connect and grow better. We deliver seamless connection for customer-facing teams with a unified platform that includes three layers: AI-powered engagement hubs, a Smart customer relationship management product (“CRM”), and a connected ecosystem supporting the customer platform with a marketplace of integrations, templates, and expert partners, a community network, and an academy of educational content.

Our engagement hubs include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Operations Hub, content management system (“CMS”) Hub and Commerce Hub, that enable companies to attract, engage, and delight customers throughout the customer lifecycle. The Smart CRM is the foundational layer that combines customer data with AI to power the entire customer platform with unified customer profiles and tools to manage and govern your team and business processes.

We focus on selling to mid-market business-to-business (“B2B”) companies, which we define as companies that have between 2 and 2,000 employees. We sell our customer platform on a subscription basis. In 2023, our total revenue was $2.2 billion and we incurred a net loss of $176.3 million. As of December 31, 2023, we had 7,663 full-time employees and 205,091 Customers, as defined in our Key Business Metrics in Item 7, of varying sizes in more than 135 countries.

Our company was formed as a limited liability company in Delaware on April 4, 2005. We converted to a Delaware corporation on June 7, 2007. Our principal executive offices are located at Two Canal Park, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and our main telephone number is 888-482-7768. Our website address is https://www.hubspot.com. Information contained on or that can be accessed through our website does not constitute part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and inclusions of our website address in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are inactive textual references only.

The HubSpot Approach

Our customer platform features a central database of lead and customer interactions and integrated applications designed to help businesses attract visitors to their websites, convert visitors into leads, close leads into customers, transact with those customers, and delight them so they become promoters of those businesses.

Designed to Help Companies Grow Better. Our customer platform was architected from the ground up to enable businesses to transform their marketing, sales, services, operations, commerce and content management playbook to meet the demands of customers today. Our customer platform includes a system of record for maintaining a unified view of the customer experience, a system of engagement for efficiently engaging customers through search engine optimization (“SEO”), web content, social, blogging, email, marketing automation, messaging, support ticketing, knowledge base, commerce, conversation routing, video hosting, deal progression, prospecting, data enrichment, and an end-to-end payment solution which enables customers to streamline their billing and payment process with fewer tools.

Ease of Use of a Single, Extensible Platform. We provide a set of integrated applications on a common platform, which offers businesses ease of use and simplicity. Our customer platform has one login, one user interface, one database, and one team for support. Our customer platform starts free and grows with our customers. It is designed to scale its power and technical sophistication without losing its ease-of-use. In addition to being a comprehensive suite itself, our customer platform seamlessly integrates with hundreds of external applications, making it easy to extend the functionality of our customer platform and customize it for any business.

Power of a Unified Customer View. At the core of our customer platform is a unified data platform for each business that captures its lead and customer activity throughout the customer lifecycle – this is our Smart CRM. Our Smart CRM creates a unified timeline incorporating all the interactions with a particular customer. In contrast to many CRM suites which are cobbled together, we have crafted a set of core functionalities, including reporting, content, messaging, data, AI assistance and automation, which runs across our product lines, which we refer to as engagement Hubs.

Scalability. Our customer platform was designed and built to serve a large number of customers with demanding use cases. Our customer platform currently processes billions of data points each week, and we use leading global cloud infrastructure providers and our own automation technology to dynamically allocate capacity to handle processing workloads of all sizes. We have built our customer platform on modern, scalable distributed technologies. We built the infrastructure to support hundreds of microservices and can easily add new features and capabilities to the customer platform. We utilize a variety of open-source distributed systems including HBase, Kafka, Vitess, and Elasticsearch to scale our data collection and processing. Our scalability gives us flexibility for future growth and enables us to service a large variety of businesses of different sizes across different industries.

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Extensible and Open Architecture. Our customer platform features a variety of open application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allows easy integration of our platform with other applications. We enable our customers to connect our platform to their other applications, such as ecommerce, event management and videoconferencing applications. By connecting third-party applications, our customers can leverage our centralized inbound database to perform additional functions and analysis.

Our Competitive Strengths

We believe that our market leadership position is based on the following key strengths:

Leading Platform. We have designed and built a world-class customer platform. We believe our customers choose our customer platform over others because of its powerful, integrated, and easy-to-use applications. We built HubSpot on a single, unified, and intuitive platform, which we believe contrasts positively with many other CRM suites. We are also investing in powerful AI capabilities in order to strengthen the customer platform even further, ensuring that customers can work smarter by drafting content, streamlining workflows, and enhancing data analysis.

Customer-centric DNA. We have a company culture that prioritizes serving customers and meeting their needs to help them grow better. This informs the product features we offer, the way we go-to-market across marketing, sales, and customer service, and also how we price and package our offerings. This customer-centricity is a key differentiator and enables us to continuously innovate.

Market Leadership and Strong Brand. We are a recognized thought leader in the cloud-based marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and content management software industry with a leading brand. Our founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, wrote the best-selling marketing book Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. Our marketing, sales, service, operations, and content management experience attracts, engages, and delights customers by being more relevant, more helpful, more personalized, and less interruptive than traditional marketing and sales tactics. Our INBOUND event is one of the largest inbound industry conference events. In 2023, we had over 11,000 registered attendees.

Large and Growing Solutions Partner Program. A Solutions Partner is a service provider that helps businesses with strategy, execution, and implementation of go-to-market activities and technology solutions. Our Solutions Partners promote our brand and offer our customer platform to their clients. Solutions Partners and customers referred to us by our Solutions Partners represented approximately 31% of our Customers as of December 31, 2023, and approximately 46% of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023. These Solutions Partners help us to promote the vision of the inbound experience, efficiently reach new mid-market businesses at scale, and provide our mutual customers with more diverse and higher-touch services.

Freemium Pricing Strategy. Our freemium model attracts customers who begin using our customer platform through our free products and then upgrade to our paid Hubs. Through our freemium products, our customers are able to receive value from HubSpot before converting to a paid product or engaging with sales.

Mid-Market Focus. We believe we have significant competitive advantages reaching mid-market businesses and efficiently reach this market at scale as a result of our inbound methodology, freemium pricing strategy, and our Solutions Partner channel.

Powerful Network Effects. We have built a large and growing ecosystem around our customer platform and company. Tens of thousands of our Customers integrate third-party applications with our customer platform. We believe this ecosystem drives more businesses and professionals to embrace the inbound playbook. As our engaged audience grows, more Solutions Partners collaborate with us, more third-party developers integrate their applications with our customer platform, and more professionals complete our certification programs, all of which generate increasing value to our customers and help to drive more businesses to adopt our customer platform.

Our Growth Strategy

The key elements to our growth strategy are:

Grow Our Customer Base. The market for our customer platform is large and underserved. Mid-market businesses are particularly underserved by existing point application vendors and often lack sufficient resources to implement complex solutions. Our all-in-one customer platform allows mid-market businesses to efficiently adopt and execute an effective inbound marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and content management strategy to help them expand and grow. We will continue to leverage our inbound go-to-market approach, freemium pricing strategy and our network of Solutions Partners to keep growing our business.

Increase Revenue from Existing Customers. With 205,091 Customers in more than 135 countries spanning many industries, we believe we have a significant opportunity to increase revenue from our existing customers. We plan to increase revenue from our existing customers by expanding their use of our customer platform by upselling additional offerings and features, including our end-to-end payment solution, adding additional users, and cross-selling our marketing, sales, service, operations, commerce, and content management products to existing customers through touchless or low touch in-product purchases.

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Our scalable pricing model allows us to capture more spend as our customers grow, increase the number of their customers and prospects managed on our customer platform, and offer additional functionality available from our higher price tiers and add-ons, providing us with a substantial opportunity to increase the lifetime value of our customer relationships.

Keep Expanding Internationally. There is a significant opportunity for our customer platform outside of the United States. As of December 31, 2023, approximately 53% of our Customers were located outside of the United States and these Customers generated approximately 47% of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023. We sell to those international Customers from our U.S., European, Asia Pacific, and South American based operations. We intend to grow our presence in international markets through additional investments in local sales, marketing and professional service capabilities, as well as by leveraging our Solutions Partner network. We have significant website traffic from regions outside the United States, and we believe that markets outside the United States represent a significant growth opportunity.

Continue to Innovate and Expand Our Customer Platform. Mid-market businesses are increasingly realizing the value of having an integrated marketing, sales, customer service, operations, commerce, and content management platform. We believe we are well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity by introducing new products and applications to extend the functionality of our customer platform. As data is becoming more important to our customers’ success and a differentiator for our business, there is a need to move quickly on data enrichment. Our acquisition of Clearbit, which we completed in December 2023, will allow us to build enriched B2B records directly into our customer platform.

Selectively Pursue Acquisitions. We plan to selectively pursue acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies and teams that would allow us to add new features and functionalities to our customer platform and accelerate the pace of our innovation, while continuing to stay focused on the customer experience.

Our Customer Platform

Our customer platform, with engagement Hubs, our Smart CRM, and connected ecosystems enable companies to have a unified customer profile and connect with their customers at every part of their customer relationship lifecycle. Each Hub can be used standalone, with our Smart platform, a third party CRM, and/or in conjunction with any version of the other Hubs. Our Hubs are available in both free and paid tiers (i.e., Starter, Professional and Enterprise) with gradually increasing levels of functionality that support the needs of our customers as their businesses grow.

Businesses that want to use software outside of our customer platform can leverage our ecosystem of third-party integrations from our platform application partners to have a single, integrated stack. We make it easy to find and install new or existing software solutions that complement our customer platform. Over 1,500 integrations and applications are available for our users, across a wide range of categories, including integrations with leading social media, email, sales, video, analytics, content and webinar tools. Customers can build custom applications and integrations on top of our customer platform themselves, or through third party developers in our ecosystem.

Smart CRM

The core of our customer platform is our Smart CRM: a single, unified, data platform of lead and customer information that allows businesses to track their interactions with contacts and customers, manage their customer activities, report on their pipeline and sales, and manage and govern their team and business processes. This allows a complete view of lead and customer interactions across all of our integrated Hubs, giving our customer platform substantial power. This Smart CRM makes it possible to personalize every aspect of the customer interaction across web content, social media engagement, and email messages across devices, including mobile. The integrated Hubs and Smart CRM on our customer platform have a common user interface and are accessed through a single login.

Marketing Hub

Marketing Hub is an all-in-one toolset for marketers to attract, engage, and nurture new leads towards sales readiness over the entire customer lifecycle. Features include: marketing automation and email, social media, SEO, and reporting and analytics.

Sales Hub

Sales Hub is designed to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of sales teams. Businesses can empower their teams with tools that deliver a personalized experience for prospects with less work for sales representatives. Features include: email templates and tracking, conversations and live chat, meeting and call scheduling, lead and website visit alerts, lead scoring, sales automation, pipeline management, quoting, forecasting, and reporting.

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Service Hub

Service Hub is our customer service software designed to help businesses manage, respond and connect with customers. Features include: conversations and live chat functionality, conversational bots, tickets and help desk, automation and routing, knowledge base, team emails, feedback and reporting tools, and customer goals.

CMS Hub

Our CMS Hub combines the power of customer relationship management and a content management system into one integrated platform. Our content tools enable businesses to create new and edit existing web content while also personalizing their websites for different visitors and optimizing their websites to convert more visitors into leads and customers. Features include: website pages, business blogging, smart content, landing pages and forms, SEO tools, forms and lead flow, web analytics reporting, calls-to-action, and file manager.

Operations Hub

Operations Hub is designed to help businesses unify customer data in a connected platform, automate business processes, and eliminate time-consuming data cleanup, and query and transform data to enable customer insights and connections. Features include: programmable automation, data sync, data curation, and data quality tools.

Commerce Hub

Commerce Hub is an easy-to-use B2B commerce suite that helps streamline the opportunity-to-cash process for businesses to get paid faster, increase revenue and save time. It includes an end-to-end payment solution, Payments, which enables customers to accept payments from their customers in less time and with fewer tools. With Payments, customers can buy and pay directly on a website, an email, or chat and native integration with the quotes feature in Sales Hub allows our customers to get paid immediately when a quote is accepted. Features include: payment links, invoices, quotes, subscription management, automation and revenue reporting.

Our Services

We complement our product offerings with professional services, customer success and support, which we view as critical elements of ensuring the long-term retention of our customers. The majority of our services and support is offered over email, phone, chat applications and via web meeting technology rather than in-person, which is a more efficient business model for us and our customers.

Professional Services. We offer professional services to educate and train customers on how to leverage our customer platform to transform how their business attracts, engages and delights customers. Depending on which Hubs and services a customer purchases, they receive onboarding guidance or one-on-one training from one of our on-boarding, inbound consultants, or technical consultants by web meetings. They can purchase additional group training and education in online or in-person classes (when offered). We also offer in-app training modules that customers can use as part of their on-boarding. Our professional services are also available to customers who need additional assistance on a one-time or ongoing basis for an additional fee. Depending on the scope of work and the services a customer needs help with, we might recommend they work with our Solutions Partner ecosystem.

Customer Success. Our customers have access to a Customer Success Manager (“CSM”), Channel Consultant ("CC"), Partner Development Manager ("PDM") or Customer Success Team (“CST”) which are responsible for our customers’ long term success, retention and growth on our customer platform. Depending on the customer spend, they will either have a dedicated CSM, or be serviced by a CST in a team based approach. Our CSMs or CST address the unique needs and goals of our customers through a series of ongoing interactions and strategy calls on how to best use our customer platform. Our CCs or PDMs play a similar role as our CSMs and CST, but focus on the growth and success of our Solutions Partners. The Solutions Partner’s customers have oversight through CSM and work collaboratively with the CC or PDM to help the Solutions Partner’s customers get the most value from our platform and the Solutions Partner’s services.

Support. In addition to assistance provided by our online articles and customer discussion forums, we offer phone and/or email and chat based support, which is included in the cost of a subscription for our Hubs. Phone, email and chat support is available starting at the Professional product level for all Hubs while email and chat based support is available for Starter Hubs. We strive to maintain an exceptional quality of customer service. We continuously monitor key customer service metrics such as phone hold time, ticket response time and ticket resolution rates, and we monitor the customer satisfaction of our customer support interactions.

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We believe our customer support is an important reason why businesses choose our customer platform and recommend it to their colleagues.

Our Customers

As of December 31, 2023, we had 205,091 Customers in more than 135 countries, representing many industries. No single customer represented more than ten percent of our revenue in 2023, 2022, or 2021.

Our Technology

Our Customers have chosen us as their customer platform, which we architected and built to be secure, highly distributed and highly scalable. Since our founding, we have embraced rapid, iterative product development lifecycles, cloud automation and open-source technologies, including big data platforms, to power marketing, sales, service, operations, commerce, and content management programs and provide insights not previously possible or available.

Our customer platform is a multi-tenant, globally available software-as-a-service delivered through APIs, web browsers or mobile applications. Our commitment to a highly available, reliable, and scalable platform for businesses of all sizes is accomplished through the use of these technologies.

Platform Approach. We built HubSpot on a single platform with reusable and composable libraries, allowing us to rapidly address new feature areas and bring new products to market that have a consistent user experience and data model. We have built this platform with scale in mind, supporting thousands of components including hundreds of microservices,

Modern Database Architecture. We process billions of data points weekly across various channels, including social media, email, SEO and website visits, and continue to drive nearly real-time analytics across these channels. This is possible because we built our database from the ground up using distributed big data technologies such as HBase, Elasticsearch and Kafka to both process and analyze the large amounts of data we collect. We also utilize Vitess to operate MySQL at scale, allowing our engineers to choose the best datastore for each task.

Agility. Our infrastructure and development and software release processes allow us to update our platform for specific groups of customers or our entire customer base at any time. This means we can rapidly innovate and deliver new functionality frequently, without waiting for quarterly or annual release cycles. We typically deploy updates to our software platform thousands of times a day, enabling us to gather immediate customer feedback and improve our product quickly and continuously.

Cost leverage. Our customer platform was built on an almost exclusive footprint of open-source software and designed to operate in cloud-based data centers. As our processing volume continues to grow, we continue to receive larger volume discounts on a per-unit basis for costs such as storage, bandwidth and computing capacity. The shared infrastructure across our products also drives operational efficiencies. We believe that our extensive use of open-source software will provide additional leverage as we scale our customer platform and infrastructure.

Scalability. By leveraging leading cloud infrastructure providers along with our automated technology stack, we are able to scale workloads of varying sizes at any time. This allows us to handle customers of all sizes and demands without traditional operational limitations such as network bandwidth, computing cycles, or storage capacity as we can scale our platform on-demand.

Reliability. Customer data is distributed and processed across multiple data centers within a region to provide redundancy. We built our customer platform on a distributed computing architecture with reduced single points of failure and we operate across data center boundaries daily. In addition to datacenter level redundancy, this architecture supports multiple live copies of each data set along with snapshot capabilities for faster, point-in-time data recovery.

Security. We leverage industry standard network and perimeter defense technologies, distributed denial-of-service, protection systems (including web application firewalls) and enterprise grade domain name system and services across multiple vendors. Our data-center providers operate and certify to high industry compliance levels. Due to the broad footprint of our customer base, we regularly test and evaluate our platform with trusted third-party vendors to ensure the security and integrity of our services.

Marketing and Sales

We believe we are a global leader in implementing an inbound experience in marketing and sales. We believe that our marketing and sales model provides us with a competitive advantage, especially when targeting mid-market businesses, because we can attract and engage these businesses efficiently and at scale.

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Inbound Marketing. Our marketing team attracts new leads and users each month through our industry-leading blog, podcast network, email newsletter and other content, free tools, large social media following, high search engine rankings and personalized website and email content. In addition, we are generating leads for new and add-on product purchases through content and offers delivered through our customer platform to existing customers.

Inbound Direct Sales. Our sales representatives throughout the world use phone, email, and web meetings to interact with prospects and customers. The majority of revenue generated by our sales representatives originates with inbound leads produced by our marketing efforts. In addition, our freemium products and in-product cross-sell offerings help close new business with little or no interaction by our sales representatives.

Inbound Channel Sales. In addition to our direct sales team, we have sales representatives that manage relationships with our worldwide network of Solutions Partners who both use our platform for their own businesses and also, on a commissioned basis, refer customers to us. These Solutions Partners collaborate with us not only to leverage our software platform and educational resources, but also to build their own business by offering new services and shifting their revenue mix to include recurring revenue streams.

Governmental Regulations

We operate globally and are subject to numerous U.S. federal, state, and foreign laws and regulations covering a wide variety of subject matters. Our compliance with these laws and regulations may be onerous and could, individually or in the aggregate, increase our cost of doing business, impact our competitive position relative to our peers, and/or otherwise have an

adverse impact on our business, reputation, financial condition, and operating results. For information about governmental regulations applicable to our business, refer to “Risk Factors” in Item 1A.

Human Capital Management

Helping millions of organizations grow better requires a truly remarkable team. We take a thoughtful approach to talent attraction and retention in order to build a company culture where people can do their best work. That’s why our culture is rooted in what we think employees want from employers today: autonomy, flexibility, transparency, and a commitment to diversity.

HubSpot is proud to be named a Best Place to Work by the Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Awards for the past nine years. Based on employees’ reviews and feedback, this recognition is a strong testament to the innovative culture we are building. We have also been recognized as a top workplace in 2022 and 2023 by Great Place to Work, and we have been named to many notable lists such as Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For and Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Women. Additionally, we’re honored to be mentioned in a number of categories by Comparably's workplace awards in 2022 and 2023 including Best CEO for Women, Best Global Culture, and a Best Company for Employee Happiness.

As of December 31, 2023, we had 7,663 full-time employees, or HubSpotters. Of these, 4,971 were in the Americas, 2,164 were in Europe, and 528 were in the Asia Pacific region.

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Competition

Our market is evolving, highly competitive and fragmented, and we expect competition to increase in the future. We believe the principal competitive factors in our market are:

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We believe we compete favorably with respect to all of these factors.

We face intense competition from other software companies that develop marketing, sales, service, and content management software. Our competitors offer various point applications that provide certain functions and features that we provide, including:

In addition, instead of using our customer platform, some prospective customers may elect to combine disparate point applications, such as content management, marketing automation, analytics, social media management, ticketing, and conversational bots. We expect that we will develop and introduce, or acquire, applications serving customer-facing and other front office functions.

Intellectual Property

Our ability to protect our intellectual property, including our technology, will be an important factor in the success and continued growth of our business. We protect our intellectual property through trade secrets law, copyrights, trademarks, patents, and contracts. Some of our technology relies upon third-party licensed intellectual property. We have 18 issued U.S. Patents and 23 patents applications pending. We intend to pursue and are pursuing additional patent protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost-effective.

In addition to the foregoing, we have established business procedures designed to maintain the confidentiality of our proprietary information, including the use of confidentiality agreements and assignment of inventions agreements with employees, independent contractors, consultants, and companies with which we conduct business.

Despite our efforts to protect our intellectual property, unauthorized parties may still copy or otherwise obtain and use our technology. In addition, we intend to continue to expand our international operations, and effective intellectual property, copyright, trademark and trade secret protection may not be available or may be limited in foreign countries. Any significant impairment of our intellectual property rights could harm our business or our ability to compete.

Financial Information About Segments

We operate as one operating segment. Operating segments are defined as components of an enterprise for which separate financial information is regularly evaluated by the chief operating decision maker (“CODM”), which is our chief executive officer, in deciding how to allocate resources and assess performance. The CODM evaluates our financial information and resources and assesses the performance of these resources on a consolidated basis. Since we operate in one operating segment, all required financial segment information can be found in the consolidated financial statements. See Footnote 10 within the consolidated financial statements for information by geographic area.

Available Information

Our website is located at http://www.hubspot.com, and our investor relations website is located at https://www.hubspot.com/investor-relations. Copies of our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are available, free of charge, on our investor relations website as soon as reasonably practicable after such reports are filed with, or furnished to, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC. The SEC also maintains a website at http://www.sec.gov that contains our SEC filings and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC.

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We webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations website. Additionally, we provide notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, and blogs as part of our investor relations website. We have used, and intend to continue to use, our investor relations website as means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. Further corporate governance information, including our certificate of incorporation, bylaws, governance guidelines, board committee charters, and code of business conduct and ethics, is also available on our investor relations website under the heading “Corporate Governance.” The contents of our websites are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC, and any references to our websites are intended to be inactive textual references only.

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Item 1A. RISK FACTORS

An investment in our common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the risks described below and the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K and in our other public filings before making an investment decision. Our business, prospects, financial condition, or operating results could be harmed by any of these risks, as well as other risks not currently known to us or that we currently consider immaterial. If any such risks and uncertainties actually occurs, our business, financial condition or operating results could differ materially from the plans, projections and other forward-looking statements included in the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and elsewhere in this report and in our other public filings. The trading price of our common stock could decline due to any of these risks, and, as a result, you may lose all or part of your investment.

Risks Related to Our Business and Strategy

We are dependent upon customer renewals, the addition of new customers, increased revenue from existing customers and the continued growth of the market for a customer platform.

We derive, and expect to continue to derive, a substantial portion of our revenue from the sale of subscriptions to our customer platform. The market for inbound marketing, sales, service, operations, commerce and customer management products is still evolving, and competitive dynamics may cause pricing levels to change as the market matures and as existing and new market participants introduce new types of point applications and different approaches to enable businesses to address their respective needs. As a result, we may be forced to reduce the prices we charge for our platform and may be unable to renew existing customer agreements or enter into new customer agreements at the same prices and upon the same terms that we have historically. In addition, our growth strategy involves a scalable pricing model (including freemium versions of our products) intended to provide us with an opportunity to increase the value of our customer relationships over time as we expand their use of our platform, sell to other parts of their organizations, cross-sell our sales products to existing marketing product customers and vice versa through touchless or low touch in product purchases, and upsell additional offerings and features. If our cross-selling efforts are unsuccessful or if our existing customers do not expand their use of our platform or adopt additional offerings and features, our operating results may suffer.

Our subscription renewal rates may decrease, and any decrease could harm our future revenue and operating results.

Our customers have no obligation to renew their subscriptions for our platform after the expiration of their subscription periods, substantially all of which are one year or less. In addition, our customers may seek to renew for lower subscription tiers, for fewer contacts or seats, or for shorter contract lengths. Also, customers may choose not to renew their subscriptions for a variety of reasons. Our renewal rates may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including limited customer resources, pricing changes, the prices of services offered by our competitors, adoption and utilization of our platform and add-on applications by our customers, adoption of our new products, customer satisfaction with our platform, mergers and acquisitions affecting our customer base, reductions in our customers’ spending levels or declines in customer activity as a result of economic downturns or uncertainty in financial markets. If our customers do not renew their subscriptions for our platform or decrease the amount they spend with us, our revenue will decline and our business will suffer.

In addition, a subscription model creates certain risks related to the timing of revenue recognition and potential reductions in cash flows. A portion of the subscription-based revenue we report each quarter results from the recognition of deferred revenue relating to subscription agreements entered into during previous quarters. In addition, we do not record deferred revenue beyond amounts invoiced as a liability on our balance sheet. A decline in new or renewed subscriptions in any period may not be immediately reflected in our reported financial results for that period, but may result in a decline in our revenue in future quarters. If we were to experience significant downturns in subscription sales and renewal rates, our reported financial results might not reflect such downturns until future periods.

We face significant competition from both established and new companies offering marketing, sales, customer service, operations, commerce, and content management software and other related applications, as well as internally developed software, which may harm our ability to add new customers, retain existing customers and grow our business.

The marketing, sales, customer service, operations, commerce, and content management software market is evolving, highly competitive and significantly fragmented. With the introduction of new technologies and the potential entry of new competitors into the market, we expect competition to persist and intensify in the future, which could harm our ability to increase sales, maintain or increase renewals and maintain our prices.

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We face intense competition from other software companies that develop marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and content management software and from marketing services companies that provide interactive marketing services. Competition could significantly impede our ability to sell subscriptions to our customer platform on terms favorable to us. Our current and potential competitors may develop and market new technologies including as a result of new or better use of evolving artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies that render our existing or future products less competitive, or obsolete. In addition, if these competitors develop products with similar or superior functionality to our platform, we may need to decrease the prices or accept less favorable terms for our platform subscriptions in order to remain competitive. If we are unable to maintain our pricing due to competitive pressures, our margins will be reduced and our operating results will be negatively affected.

Our competitors include:

In addition, instead of using our platform, some prospective customers may elect to combine disparate point applications, such as content management, marketing automation, CRM, analytics and social media management. We expect that new competitors, such as enterprise software vendors that have traditionally focused on enterprise resource planning or other applications supporting back office functions, will develop and introduce applications serving customer-facing and other front office functions. This development could have an adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition. In addition, sales force automation and CRM vendors could acquire or develop applications that compete with our sales and CRM offerings. Some of these companies have acquired social media marketing and other marketing software providers to integrate with their broader offerings.

Our current and potential competitors may have significantly more financial, technical, marketing and other resources than we have, be able to devote greater resources to the development, promotion, sale and support of their products and services, may have more extensive customer bases and broader customer relationships than we have, and may have longer operating histories and greater name recognition than we have. As a result, these competitors may respond faster to new technologies and undertake more extensive marketing campaigns for their products. In a few cases, these vendors may also be able to offer marketing, sales, customer service and content management software at little or no additional cost by bundling it with their existing suite of applications. To the extent any of our competitors has existing relationships with potential customers for either marketing software or other applications, those customers may be unwilling to purchase our platform because of their existing relationships with our competitor. If we are unable to compete with such companies, the demand for our customer platform could substantially decline.

In addition, if one or more of our competitors were to merge or partner with another of our competitors, our ability to compete effectively could be adversely affected. Our competitors may also establish or strengthen cooperative relationships with our current or future strategic distribution and technology partners or other parties with whom we have relationships, thereby limiting our ability to promote and implement our platform. We may not be able to compete successfully against current or future competitors, and competitive pressures may harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

We have experienced rapid growth and organizational change in recent periods and expect growth of headcount and operations over the long-term. If we fail to manage growth and organizational change effectively, we may be unable to execute our business plan, maintain high levels of service or address competitive challenges adequately.

After the implementation of our Restructuring Plan in January 2023, our headcount and operations continued to grow. For example, we had 7,663 full-time employees as of December 31, 2023 and 7,433 as of December 31, 2022. To date, we have opened several international offices. This growth has placed, and will continue to place, a significant strain on our management, administrative, operational and financial infrastructure. We expect to continue to grow headcount and operations over the long-term. We anticipate future growth will be required over the long term to address increases in our product offerings and continued expansion. Our success will depend in part upon our ability to recruit, hire, train, manage and integrate qualified managers, technical personnel and employees in specialized roles within our company, including in technology, sales and marketing. Furthermore, as more of our employees work remotely from geographic areas across the globe on a permanent basis pursuant to our hybrid workplace model, which provides our employees with the option to be fully remote, work full-time from one of our offices, or have the flexibility to work both in the office and remotely, we may need to reallocate our investment of resources and closely monitor a variety of local regulations and requirements, including local tax laws.

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We may experience unpredictability in our expenses and employee work culture. If we experience any of these effects in connection with future growth, if our new employees perform poorly, or if we are unsuccessful in recruiting, hiring, training, managing and integrating new employees, or retaining our existing employees, it could materially impair our ability to attract new customers, retain existing customers and expand their use of our platform, all of which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Failure to effectively develop and expand our marketing, sales, customer service, operations, commerce and content management capabilities could harm our ability to increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our platform.

To increase Customers and achieve broader market acceptance of our customer platform, we will need to continue to expand our marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and content management capabilities, including our sales force and third-party channel partners. We will continue to dedicate significant resources to inbound sales and marketing programs. The effectiveness of our inbound sales and marketing and third-party channel partners has varied over time and may vary in the future and depends on our ability to maintain and improve our customer platform including with respect to AI and machine learning. All of these efforts will require us to invest significant financial and other resources. Our business will be seriously harmed if our efforts do not generate a correspondingly significant increase in revenue. We may not achieve anticipated revenue growth from expanding our sales force if we are unable to hire, develop and retain talented sales personnel, if our new sales personnel are unable to achieve desired productivity levels in a reasonable period of time or if our sales and marketing programs are not effective.

The rate of growth of our business depends on the continued participation and level of service of our Solutions Partners.

We rely on our Solutions Partners to provide certain services to our customers, as well as pursue sales of our customer platform to customers. To the extent we do not attract new Solutions Partners, or existing or new Solutions Partners do not refer a growing number of customers to us, our revenue and operating results would be harmed. In addition, if our Solutions Partners do not continue to provide services to our customers, we would be required to provide such services ourselves either by expanding our internal team or engaging other third-party providers, which would increase our operating costs.

If we fail to maintain our inbound thought leadership position, our business may suffer.

We believe that maintaining our thought leadership position in inbound marketing, sales, services, operations, commerce and content management is an important element in attracting new customers. We devote significant resources to develop and maintain our thought leadership position, with a focus on identifying and interpreting emerging trends in the inbound experience, shaping and guiding industry dialog and creating and sharing the best inbound practices. Our activities related to developing and maintaining our thought leadership may not yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses we incurred in such effort. We rely upon the continued services of our management and employees with domain expertise with inbound marketing, sales, services, operations, and content management, and the loss of any key employees in this area could harm our competitive position and reputation. If we fail to successfully grow and maintain our thought leadership position, we may not attract enough new customers or retain our existing customers, and our business could suffer.

If we fail to further enhance our brand and maintain our existing strong brand awareness, our ability to expand our customer base will be impaired and our financial condition may suffer.

We believe that our development of the HubSpot brand is critical to achieving widespread awareness of our existing and future inbound experience solutions, and, as a result, is important to attracting new customers and maintaining existing customers. In the past, our efforts to build our brand have involved significant expenses, and we believe that this investment has resulted in strong brand recognition in the B2B market. Successful promotion and maintenance of our brands will depend largely on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts and on our ability to provide a reliable and useful customer platform at competitive prices. Brand promotion activities may not yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses we incurred in building our brand. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand, our business could suffer.

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If we fail to adapt and respond effectively to rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards and changing customer needs or requirements, our customer platform may become less competitive.

Our future success depends on our ability to adapt and innovate our customer platform. To attract new customers and increase revenue from existing customers, we need to continue to enhance and improve our offerings to meet customer needs at prices that our customers are willing to pay. Such efforts will require adding new functionality and responding to technological advancements, including AI and machine learning, which will increase our research and development costs. If we are unable to develop new applications that address our customers’ needs, or to enhance and improve our platform in a timely manner, we may not be able to maintain or increase market acceptance of our platform. Our ability to grow is also subject to the risk of future disruptive technologies. Access and use of our customer platform is provided via the cloud, which, itself, was disruptive to the previous enterprise software model. If new technologies emerge that are able to deliver inbound marketing software and related applications at lower prices, more efficiently, more conveniently or more securely, such technologies could adversely affect our ability to compete.

If we fail to offer high-quality customer support, our business and reputation may suffer.

High-quality education, training and customer support are important for the successful marketing, sale and use of our customer platform and for the renewal of existing customers. Providing this education, training and support requires that our personnel who manage our online training resource, HubSpot Academy, or provide customer support have specific inbound experience domain knowledge and expertise, making it more difficult for us to hire qualified personnel and to scale up our support operations. The importance of high-quality customer support will increase as we expand our business and pursue new customers. If we do not help our customers use multiple applications within our customer platform and provide effective ongoing support, our ability to sell additional functionality and services to, or to retain, existing customers may suffer and our reputation with existing or potential customers may be harmed.

We may not be able to scale our business quickly enough to meet our customers’ growing needs and if we are not able to grow efficiently, our operating results could be harmed.

As usage of our customer platform grows and as customers use our platform for additional inbound applications, such as sales and services, we will need to devote additional resources to improving our application architecture, integrating with third-party systems and maintaining infrastructure performance. In addition, we will need to appropriately scale our internal business systems and our services organization, including customer support and professional services, to serve our growing customer base, particularly as our customer demographics change over time. Any failure of or delay in these efforts could cause impaired system performance and reduced customer satisfaction. These issues could reduce the attractiveness of our customer platform to customers, resulting in decreased sales to new customers, lower renewal rates by existing customers, the issuance of service credits, or requested refunds, which could impede our revenue growth and harm our reputation. Even if we are able to upgrade our systems and expand our staff, any such expansion will be expensive and complex, requiring management’s time and attention. We could also face inefficiencies or operational failures as a result of our efforts to scale our infrastructure. Moreover, there are inherent risks associated with upgrading, improving and expanding our information technology systems. We cannot be sure that the expansion and improvements to our infrastructure and systems will be fully or effectively implemented on a timely basis, if at all.

Our ability to introduce new products and features is dependent on adequate research and development resources. If we do not adequately fund our research and development efforts, we may not be able to compete effectively and our business and operating results may be harmed.

To remain competitive, we must continue to develop new product offerings, applications, features and enhancements to our existing customer platform. Maintaining adequate research and development personnel and resources to meet the demands of the market is essential. If we are unable to develop our platform internally due to certain constraints, such as high employee turnover, lack of management ability or a lack of other research and development resources, we may miss market opportunities. Further, many of our competitors expend a considerably greater amount of funds on their research and development programs, and those that do not may be acquired by larger companies that would allocate greater resources to our competitors’ research and development programs. Our failure to maintain adequate research and development resources or to compete effectively with the research and development programs of our competitors could materially adversely affect our business.

The development of next-generation solutions that utilize new and advanced features, including AI and machine learning, involves making predictions regarding the willingness of the market to adopt such technologies over legacy solutions. The Company may be required to commit significant resources to developing new products, software and services before knowing whether such investment will result in products or services that the market will accept.

The Company’s inability, for technological or other reasons, some of which may be beyond the Company’s control, to enhance, develop, introduce and monetize products and services in a timely manner, or at all, in response to changing market conditions or customer requirements could have a material adverse effect on the Company’s business, results of operations and financial condition or could result in its products and services not achieving market acceptance or becoming obsolete.

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In addition, if the Company fails to deliver a compelling customer experience or accurately predict emerging technological trends and the changing needs of customers and end users, or if the features of its new products and services do not meet the demands of its customers or are not sufficiently differentiated from those of its competitors, the Company’s business, results of operations and financial condition could be materially harmed.

Uncertainty around new and emerging AI applications such as generative AI content creation may require additional investment in the development of proprietary datasets, machine learning models and systems to test for accuracy, bias and other variables, which are often complex, development of new approaches and processes to provide attribution or remuneration to content creators and building systems that enable creatives to have greater control over the use of their work in the development of AI, which may be costly and could impact our profit margin if we are unable to monetize such assets. In addition, AI technologies, including generative AI, may create content that appears correct but is factually inaccurate or flawed, or contains copyrighted or other protected material, and if our customers or others use this flawed content to their detriment, we may be exposed to brand or reputational harm, competitive harm, and/or legal liability. Developing, testing and deploying AI systems may also increase the cost profile of our offerings due to the nature of the computing costs involved in such systems.

Changes in the sizes or types of businesses that purchase our platform or in the applications within our customer platform purchased or used by our customers could negatively affect our operating results.

Our strategy is to sell subscriptions to our customer platform to mid-sized businesses, but we have sold and will continue to sell to organizations ranging from small businesses to enterprises. Our gross margins can vary depending on numerous factors related to the implementation and use of our customer platform, including the sophistication and intensity of our customers’ use of our platform and the level of professional services and support required by a customer. Sales to enterprise customers may entail longer sales cycles and more significant selling efforts. Selling to small businesses may involve greater credit risk and uncertainty. If there are changes in the mix of businesses that purchase our platform or the mix of the product plans purchased by our customers, our gross margins could decrease and our operating results could be adversely affected.

We have in the past completed acquisitions and may acquire or invest in other companies or technologies in the future, which could divert management’s attention, fail to meet our expectations, result in additional dilution to our stockholders, increase expenses, disrupt our operations or harm our operating results.

We have in the past acquired, and we may in the future acquire or invest in, businesses, products or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our platform, enhance our technical capabilities or otherwise offer growth opportunities. For example, in December 2023, we acquired Clearbit, a B2B data provider. We may not be able to fully realize the anticipated benefits of historical or any future acquisitions. The pursuit of potential acquisitions may divert the attention of management and cause us to incur various expenses related to identifying, investigating and pursuing suitable acquisitions, whether or not they are consummated.

There are inherent risks in integrating and managing acquisitions. If we acquire additional businesses, we may not be able to assimilate or integrate the acquired personnel, operations and technologies successfully or effectively manage the combined business following the acquisition and our management may be distracted from operating our business. We also may not achieve the anticipated benefits from the acquired business due to a number of factors, including: unanticipated costs or liabilities associated with the acquisition; incurrence of acquisition-related costs, which would be recognized as a current period expense; inability to generate sufficient revenue to offset acquisition or investment costs; the inability to maintain relationships with customers and partners of the acquired business; the difficulty of incorporating acquired technology and rights into our platform and of maintaining quality and security standards consistent with our brand; delays in customer purchases due to uncertainty related to any acquisition; the need to integrate or implement additional controls, procedures and policies; challenges caused by distance, language and cultural differences; harm to our existing business relationships with business partners and customers as a result of the acquisition; the potential loss of key employees; use of resources that are needed in other parts of our business and diversion of management and employee resources; and use of substantial portions of our available cash or the incurrence of debt to consummate the acquisition. Acquisitions also increase the risk of unforeseen legal and compliance liabilities, including for potential violations of applicable law or industry rules and regulations, arising from prior or ongoing acts or omissions by the acquired businesses which are not discovered by due diligence during the acquisition process, including data handling and privacy violations. Generally, if an acquired business fails to meet our expectations, our operating results, business and financial condition may suffer. Acquisitions could also result in dilutive issuances of equity securities or the incurrence of debt, which could adversely affect our business, results of operations or financial condition.

In addition, a significant portion of the purchase price of companies we acquire may be allocated to goodwill and other intangible assets, which must be assessed for impairment at least annually. If our acquisitions do not ultimately yield expected returns, we may be required to make charges to our operating results based on our impairment assessment process, which could harm our results of operations.

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Because our long-term growth strategy involves further expansion of our sales to customers outside the United States, our business will be susceptible to risks associated with international operations.

A component of our growth strategy involves the further expansion of our operations and customer base internationally. We have formed several international entities and may plan to form additional entities in the future. These international operations focus primarily on sales, professional services and support, and select international locations have development teams. Our current international operations and future initiatives will involve a variety of risks, including:

Our limited experience in operating our business internationally increases the risk that any potential future expansion efforts that we may undertake will not be successful. If in the future, we invest substantial time and resources to expand our international operations and are unable to do so successfully and in a timely manner, our business and operating results will suffer. We continue to implement policies and procedures to facilitate our compliance with U.S. laws and regulations applicable to or arising from our international business. Inadequacies in our past or current compliance practices may increase the risk of inadvertent violations of such laws and regulations, which could lead to financial and other penalties that could damage our reputation and impose costs on us.

Social and ethical issues relating to the use of new and evolving technologies, such as AI, in our offerings may result in reputational harm and liability.

Social and ethical issues relating to the use of new and evolving technologies such as AI in our offerings, may result in reputational harm and liability, and may cause us to incur additional research and development costs to resolve such issues. We are increasingly building AI into many of our offerings, including early-stage generative AI features. As with many innovations, AI presents risks and challenges that could affect its adoption, and therefore our business. If we enable or offer solutions that draw controversy due to their perceived or actual impact on human rights, privacy, employment, or in other social contexts, we may experience brand or reputational harm, competitive harm or legal liability. Potential government regulation related to AI use and ethics may also increase the burden and cost of research and development in this area, and failure to properly remediate AI usage or ethics issues may cause public confidence in AI to be undermined, which could slow adoption of AI in our products and services.

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The rapid evolution of AI will require the application of resources to develop, test and maintain our products and services to help ensure that AI is implemented ethically in order to minimize unintended, harmful impact.

Risks Related to Employee Matters

If we cannot maintain our company culture as we experience changes in our workforce, we could lose the innovation, teamwork, passion and focus on execution that we believe contribute to our success and our business may be harmed.

We believe that a critical component to our success has been our company culture, which is based on transparency and personal autonomy. We have invested substantial time and resources in building our team within this company culture. In 2020, we made the decision to permanently move to a hybrid workplace model, which means our employees have the option to be fully remote, work full-time from one of our offices, or work both in the office and remotely. Preservation of our corporate culture has been made more difficult as the majority of our workforce has been working from home. Any failure to preserve our culture could negatively affect our ability to retain and recruit personnel and to effectively focus on and pursue our corporate objectives. As we grow and continue to develop our company infrastructure, and experience organizational change, we may find it difficult to maintain these important aspects of our company culture and our business may be adversely impacted

We rely on our management team and other key employees, and the loss of one or more key employees could harm our business.

Our success and future growth depend upon the continued services of our management team, including our co-founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, our chief executive officer, Yamini Rangan, and other key employees in the areas of research and development, marketing, sales, services, operations, content management, and general and administrative functions. From time to time, there may be changes in our management team resulting from the hiring or departure of executives, which could disrupt our business. We also are dependent on the continued service of our existing software engineers and information technology personnel because of the complexity of our platform, technologies and infrastructure. We may terminate any employee’s employment at any time, with or without cause, and any employee may resign at any time, with or without cause. We do not have employment agreements with any of our key personnel. The loss of one or more of our key employees could harm our business.

The failure to attract and retain additional qualified personnel could prevent us from executing our business strategy.

To execute our business strategy, we must attract and retain highly qualified personnel. In particular, we compete with many other companies for software developers with high levels of experience in designing, developing and managing cloud-based software, as well as for skilled information technology, marketing, sales and operations professionals, and we may not be successful in attracting and retaining the professionals we need. Also, inbound sales, marketing, services, operations, and content management domain experts are very important to our success and are difficult to replace. We have from time to time in the past experienced, and we expect to continue to experience in the future, difficulty in hiring and difficulty in retaining highly skilled employees with appropriate qualifications. In particular, we have experienced a competitive hiring environment in the Greater Boston area, where we are headquartered and will continue to experience a competitive hiring environment as we recruit for remote talent worldwide. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we do. The change by companies to offer a remote or hybrid work environment may increase the competition for such employees from employers outside of our traditional office locations. In addition, if we choose to no longer offer a remote or hybrid work environment, we may face more difficulty in retaining our workforce. Further, labor is subject to external factors that are beyond our control, including our industry’s highly competitive market for skilled workers and leaders, cost inflation, and workforce participation rates. In addition, if our reputation were to be harmed, whether as a result of media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny or otherwise, it could make it more difficult to attract and retain personnel that are critical to the success of our business.

In addition, in making employment decisions, particularly in the software industry, job candidates often consider the value of equity incentives they are to receive in connection with their employment. If the price of our stock declines, or experiences significant volatility, our ability to attract or retain key employees will be adversely affected. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our growth prospects could be severely harmed.

 

Risks Related to Global Economic Conditions We face exposure to movements in currency exchange rates, which may cause our revenue and operating results to differ materially from expectations.

We are exposed to fluctuations in currency exchange rates that could adversely affect our financial results.

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As we have expanded our international operations, our exposure to exchange rate fluctuations has increased, in particular with respect to the Euro, British Pound Sterling, Australian Dollar, Singapore Dollar, Japanese Yen, Colombian Peso, and Canadian Dollar. Fluctuations in the value of the U.S. dollar versus foreign currencies may impact our operating results when translated into U.S. dollars. Thus, our results of operations and cash flows are subject to fluctuations due to changes in foreign currency exchange rates and may be adversely affected in the future due to changes in foreign currency exchange rates. As exchange rates vary, revenue, cost of revenue, operating expenses and other operating results, when re-measured, may differ materially from expectations. In addition, our operating results are subject to fluctuation if our mix of U.S. and foreign currency denominated transactions and expenses changes in the future. Our Board recently approved a hedging program intended to allow us to mitigate foreign exchange impacts, such as exposure to currency exchange rates in connection with significant transactions denominated in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, by entering into derivatives transactions such as foreign exchange forwards. Once implemented, there can be no guarantee or assurance that such hedging program (or any other strategies we implement in the future to mitigate foreign currency risk) and the strategies we would employ pursuant thereto would be effective to reduce or eliminate our exposure to foreign exchange rate fluctuations to the extent we anticipate, or at all. Additionally, as we anticipate growing our business further outside of the United States, the effects of movements in currency exchange rates will increase as our transaction volume outside of the United States increases.

Weakened global economic conditions may harm our industry, business and results of operations.

Our overall performance depends in part on worldwide economic conditions. Global financial developments and downturns seemingly unrelated to us or the software industry may harm us. The United States and other key international economies have been affected from time to time by falling demand for a variety of goods and services, restricted credit, poor liquidity, reduced corporate profitability, volatility in credit, equity and foreign exchange markets, volatility in the banking sector, changes in the labor market, supply chain disruptions, bankruptcies, inflation and overall uncertainty with respect to the economy, including with respect to tariff and trade issues. Moreover, a potential U.S. federal government shutdown resulting from budgetary decisions, a prolonged continuing resolution, breach of the federal debt ceiling, or a potential U.S. sovereign default and the uncertainty surrounding the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election may increase uncertainty and volatility in the global economy and financial markets. Weak economic conditions or significant uncertainty regarding the stability of financial markets related to stock market volatility, inflation, recession, changes in tariffs, trade agreements or governmental fiscal, monetary and tax policies, among others, could adversely impact our business, financial condition and operating results. Further, weak market conditions have, and could in the future result in, impairment of our investments and long-lived assets.

Further, the economies of countries in Europe have been experiencing weakness associated with high sovereign debt levels, weakness in the banking sector, uncertainty over the future of the Euro zone and volatility in the value of the pound sterling and the Euro and instability resulting from the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The effect of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, including any resulting sanctions, export controls or other restrictive actions that may be imposed against governmental or other entities in, for example, Russia, have in the past contributed and may in the future contribute to disruption, instability and volatility in the global markets. We have operations, as well as current and potential new customers, throughout Europe. If economic conditions in Europe and other key markets for our platform continue to remain uncertain or deteriorate further, it could adversely affect our customers’ ability or willingness to subscribe to our platform, delay prospective customers’ purchasing decisions, reduce the value or duration of their subscriptions or affect renewal rates, all of which could harm our operating results.

More recently, global inflation rates have increased to levels not seen in several decades, which may result in decreased demand for our products and services, increases in our operating costs, including our labor costs, constrained credit and liquidity, reduced government spending and volatility in financial markets. The Federal Reserve and other international government agencies have raised, and may again raise, interest rates in response to concerns over inflation risk. Increases in interest rates on credit and debt that would increase the cost of any borrowing that we may make from time to time and could impact our ability to access the capital markets. Increases in interest rates, especially if coupled with reduced government spending and volatility in financial markets, may have the effect of further increasing economic uncertainty and heightening these risks. In an inflationary environment, we may be unable to raise the sales prices of our products and services at or above the rate at which our costs increase, which could/would reduce our profit margins and have a material adverse effect on our financial results and net income. We also may experience lower than expected sales and potential adverse impacts on our competitive position if there is a decrease in consumer spending or a negative reaction to our pricing. A reduction in our revenue would be detrimental to our profitability and financial condition and could also have an adverse impact on our future growth.

There continues to be uncertainty in the changing market and economic conditions, including the possibility of additional measures that could be taken by the Federal Reserve and other domestic and international government agencies, related to concerns over inflation risk. A sharp rise in interest rates could have an adverse impact on the fair market value of certain securities in our portfolio and investments in some financial instruments could pose risks arising from market liquidity and credit concerns, which could adversely affect our financial results.

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The current economic downturn may lead to decreased demand for our products and services and otherwise harm our business and results of operations.

Our overall performance depends, in part, on worldwide economic conditions. In recent months, we have observed increased economic uncertainty in the United States and abroad. Impacts of such economic weakness include:

These developments could lead to inflation, higher interest rates, and uncertainty about business continuity, which may adversely affect our business and our results of operations. As our customers react to global economic conditions and the potential for a global recession, we may see them reduce spending on our products and take additional precautionary measures to limit or delay expenditures and preserve capital and liquidity. Reductions in spending on our solutions, delays in purchasing decisions, lack of renewals, inability to attract new customers, as well as pressure for extended billing terms or pricing discounts, would limit our ability to grow our business and could negatively affect our operating results and financial condition.

Risks Related to Our Technical Operations Infrastructure and Dependence on Third Parties

Interruptions or delays in service from our third-party data center providers could impair our ability to deliver our platform to our customers, resulting in customer dissatisfaction, damage to our reputation, loss of customers, limited growth and reduction in revenue.

We currently serve the majority of our platform functions from third-party data center hosting facilities operated by Amazon Web Services in the United States and Europe. We also have several colocations which host certain critical services (for example, VPN access) in various locations around the world. In addition, we use Cloudflare Global CDN to optimize content delivery across our locations.

Any damage to, or failure of, the systems of our third-party providers could result in interruptions to our platform. Despite precautions taken at our data centers, the occurrence of spikes in usage volume, a natural disaster, such as earthquakes or hurricane, an act of terrorism, geopolitical conflict, vandalism or sabotage, a disruptive cyber attack, a decision to close a facility without adequate notice, power or telecommunications failures or other unanticipated problems at a facility could result in lengthy interruptions in the availability of our on-demand software. In the event that any of our third-party facilities arrangements is terminated, or if there is a lapse of service or damage to a facility, we could experience interruptions in our platform as well as delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services. Even with current and planned disaster recovery arrangements, our business could be harmed. Also, in the event of damage or interruption, our insurance policies may not adequately compensate us for any losses that we may incur. These factors in turn could further reduce our revenue, subject us to liability and cause us to issue credits or cause customers to fail to renew their subscriptions, any of which could materially adversely affect our business.

If our customer platform has outages or fails due to defects or similar problems, and if we fail to correct any defect or other software problems, we could lose customers, become subject to service performance or warranty claims or incur significant costs.

Our customer platform and its underlying infrastructure are inherently complex and may contain material defects or errors. We release modifications, updates, bug fixes and other changes to our software several times per day, without traditional human-performed quality control reviews for each release. We have from time to time found defects in our software and may discover additional defects in the future. We may not be able to detect and correct defects or errors before customers begin to use our platform or its applications. Consequently, we or our customers may discover defects or errors after our platform has been implemented. Defects or errors could result in product outages and could also cause inaccuracies in the data we collect and process for our customers, or even the loss, damage or inadvertent release of such confidential data.

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We implement bug fixes and upgrades as part of our regular system maintenance, which may lead to system downtime. Even if we are able to implement the bug fixes and upgrades in a timely manner, any history of product outages, defects or inaccuracies in the data we collect for our customers, or the loss, damage or inadvertent release of confidential data could cause our reputation to be harmed, and customers may elect not to purchase or renew their agreements with us. Furthermore, these issues could subject us to service performance credits (whether offered by us or required by contract), warranty claims or increased insurance costs. The costs associated with product outages, any material defects or errors in our platform or other performance problems may be substantial and could materially adversely affect our operating results.

In addition, third-party applications and features on our customer platform may not meet the same quality standards that we apply to our own development efforts and, to the extent they contain bugs, vulnerabilities or defects, they may create disruptions in our customers’ use of our products, lead to data loss, unauthorized access to customer data, damage our brand and reputation and affect the continued use of our products, any of which could harm our business, results of operations and financial condition.

If our information technology systems, including our customer platform, have outages or fail due to defects or similar problems, and if we fail to correct any defect or other software problems, it could disrupt our internal operations or services provided to customers, and could reduce our revenue, increase our expenses, damage our reputation and adversely affect our cash flows and stock price.

We rely on our information technology systems, including the sustained and uninterrupted performance of our customer platform, to manage numerous aspects of our business, including marketing, sales, content management, customer service and other internal operations. Our information technology systems are an essential component of our business and any disruption could significantly limit our ability to manage and operate our business efficiently.

Our customer platform and its underlying infrastructure are inherently complex and may contain material defects or errors. We release modifications, updates, bug fixes and other changes to our software several times per day, without traditional human-performed quality control reviews for each release. While we seek to implement secure development practices, we cannot eliminate the risk that our applications may have vulnerabilities. We have from time to time found defects in our software and may discover in the future additional defects, outages, delays or cessations of service, performance and quality problems or may produce errors in connection with systems integrations, migration work or other causes, which could result in business disruptions and the process of remediating them could be more expensive, time-consuming, disruptive and resource intensive than planned. Such disruptions could adversely impact our internal operations and interrupt other processes. Delayed sales, lower margins or lost customers resulting from these disruptions could reduce our revenue, increase our expenses, damage our reputation and adversely affect our cash flows and stock price.

We are dependent on the continued availability of third-party data hosting and transmission services.

A significant portion of our operating cost is from our third-party data hosting and transmission services, including Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), which hosts the substantial majority of our products and platform. If the costs for such services increase due to vendor consolidation, regulation, contract renegotiation, or otherwise, we may not be able to increase the fees for our customer platform or services to cover the changes, which could have a negative impact on our operating results.

Additionally, our customers need to be able to access our platform at any time, without interruption or degradation of performance. AWS runs its own platform that we access, and we are, therefore, vulnerable to service interruptions at AWS. We have experienced, and expect that in the future we may experience interruptions, delays and outages in service and availability due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, human or software errors, website hosting disruptions and capacity constraints. In some instances, including because we do not control our service providers, we may not be able to identify the cause or causes of these problems within a period of time acceptable to our customers. Additionally, as our business continues to grow, to the extent that we do not effectively address capacity constraints, through our providers of cloud infrastructure, our results of operations may be adversely affected. In addition, any changes in service levels from our service providers may adversely affect our ability to meet our customers’ requirements, result in negative publicity which could harm our reputation and brand and may adversely affect the usage of our platform.

If we do not or cannot maintain the compatibility of our customer platform with third-party applications that our customers use in their businesses, our revenue will decline.

A significant percentage of our customers choose to integrate our platform with certain capabilities provided by third-party application providers using application programming interfaces (“APIs”) published by these providers. The functionality and popularity of our customer platform depends, in part, on our ability to integrate our platform with third-party applications and platforms, including CRM, CMS, e-commerce, call center, analytics and social media sites that our customers use and from which they obtain data. Third-party providers of applications and APIs may change the features of their applications and platforms, restrict our access to their applications and platforms, or alter the terms governing use of their applications and APIs and access to those applications and platforms in an adverse manner.

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Such changes could functionally limit or terminate our ability to use these third-party applications and platforms in conjunction with our platform, which could negatively impact our offerings and harm our business. If we fail to integrate our platform with new third-party applications and platforms that our customers use for marketing, sales, services, operations, commerce, or content management purposes, or fail to renew existing relationships pursuant to which we currently provide such integration, we may not be able to offer the functionality that our customers need, which would negatively impact our ability to generate new revenue or maintain existing revenue and adversely impact our business.

We rely on data provided by third parties, the loss of which could limit the functionality of our platform and disrupt our business.

Select functionality of our customer platform depends on our ability to deliver data, including search engine results and social media updates, provided by unaffiliated third parties, such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter. Some of this data is provided to us pursuant to third-party data sharing policies and terms of use, under data sharing agreements by third-party providers or by customer consent. In the future, any of these third parties could change its data sharing policies, including making them more restrictive, or alter its algorithms that determine the placement, display, and accessibility of search results and social media updates, any of which could result in the loss of, or significant impairment to, our ability to collect and provide useful data to our customers. These third parties could also interpret our, or our service providers’ data collection policies or practices as being inconsistent with their policies, which could result in the loss of our ability to collect this data for our customers. Any such changes could impair our ability to deliver data to our customers and could adversely impact select functionality of our platform, impairing the return on investment that our customers derive from using our solution, as well as adversely affecting our business and our ability to generate revenue.

Privacy concerns and end users’ acceptance of Internet behavior tracking may limit the applicability, use and adoption of our customer platform.

Privacy concerns may cause end users to resist providing the personal data necessary to allow our customers to use our platform effectively. We have implemented various features intended to enable our customers to better protect end user privacy, but these measures may not alleviate all potential privacy concerns and threats. Even the perception of privacy concerns, whether or not valid, may inhibit market adoption of our platform. Privacy advocacy groups and the technology and other industries are considering various new, additional or different self-regulatory standards that may place additional burdens on us. The costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by these groups’ policies and actions may limit the use and adoption of our customer platform and reduce overall demand for it, or lead to significant fines, penalties or liabilities for any noncompliance or loss of any such action.

If our or our customers’ security measures are compromised or unauthorized access to data of our customers or their customers is otherwise obtained, our customer platform may be perceived as not being secure, our customers may be harmed and may curtail or cease their use of our platform, our reputation may be damaged and we may incur significant liabilities.

Our operations involve the storage and transmission of data of our customers and their customers, including personal data. Our storage is typically the sole source of record for portions of our customers’ businesses and end user data, such as initial contact information and online interactions. Security incidents could result in unauthorized access to, loss of or unauthorized disclosure of this information, litigation, indemnity obligations and other possible liabilities, as well as negative publicity, which could damage our reputation, impair our sales and harm our customers and our business. Cyber-attacks and other malicious Internet-based activity continue to increase generally, and cloud-based platform providers of marketing services have been targeted. If our security measures, or those of our service providers, are compromised as a result of third-party action, employee or customer error, malfeasance, stolen or fraudulently obtained log-in credentials or otherwise, our reputation could be damaged, our business may be harmed and we could incur significant liability. Additionally, if third parties with whom we work, such as vendors or developers, violate applicable laws, our security policies or our acceptable use policy, such violations may also put our customers’ information at risk and could in turn have an adverse effect on our business. In addition, if the security measures of our customers or our service providers are compromised, even without any actual compromise of our own systems, we may face negative publicity or reputational harm if our customers or anyone else incorrectly attributes the blame for such security breaches to us or our systems. We may be unable to anticipate or prevent techniques used to obtain unauthorized access or to sabotage systems because they change frequently and generally are not detected until after an incident has occurred. As we increase our customer base and our brand becomes more widely known and recognized, we may become more of a target for third parties seeking to compromise our security systems or gain unauthorized access to our customers’ data. Additionally, we provide our employees with extensive access to our databases, which store our customer data, and to our APIs to facilitate our rapid pace of product development and to support our customers. If such access, unauthorized access or our own operations, cause the loss, damage, destruction or loss (including, without limitation, because of actions by a bad actor, attempts to exfiltrate customer data (which attempts we have experienced in the past and could experience in the future), our systems being compromised or unintentional or accidental disclosure, or destruction of our customers’ business data, their sales, lead generation, support and other business operations may be permanently harmed. As a result, our customers may bring claims against us for lost profits and other damages, or such concerns may cause us to limit access by our development team.

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Additionally, in certain of our subscription agreements with our customers, we agree to indemnify these customers against claims by a third party alleging our breach of confidentiality obligations or our misuse of customer data in violation of the subscription agreement.

Cyber-attacks, denial-of-service attacks, ransomware attacks, business email compromises, computer malware, viruses, and social engineering (including phishing) are prevalent in our industry, the industries of certain of our service providers and our customers' industries. Our internal computer systems and those of our current and any future strategic collaborators, vendors, and other contractors or consultants are vulnerable to damage from cyber-attacks, computer viruses, unauthorized access, natural disasters, cybersecurity threats, terrorism, geopolitical conflict, war and telecommunication and electrical failures. Accordingly, if our cybersecurity measures or those of our service providers fail to protect against unauthorized access, attacks (which may include sophisticated cyber-attacks), compromise or the mishandling of data by our employees and contractors, then our reputation, customer trust, business, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected. Cyber incidents have been increasing in sophistication and frequency and can include third parties gaining access to employee or customer data using stolen or inferred credentials, computer malware, viruses, spamming, phishing attacks, ransomware, card skimming code, and other deliberate attacks and attempts to gain unauthorized access. This risk is increased by the difficulty of balancing rapid vulnerability patching and system availability in a large and rapidly-changing production environment. At times, we may be unable to patch all of our systems in a manner that strictly adheres to our internally prescribed timelines. The techniques used to sabotage or to obtain unauthorized access to our platform, systems, networks, or physical facilities in which data is stored or through which data is transmitted change frequently, and we may be unable to implement adequate preventative measures or stop security breaches while they are occurring. Because the techniques used by threat actors who may attempt to penetrate and sabotage our computer systems change frequently and may not be recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques. Additionally, as remote work and resource access expand, there is an increased risk that we may experience cybersecurity-related events such as phishing attacks, exploitation of any cybersecurity flaws that may exist, an increase in the number of cybersecurity threats or attacks, and other security challenges as a result of most of our employees and our service providers continuing to work remotely from non-corporate managed networks. There is also a risk of potential increase in such attacks due to cyberwarfare in connection with the ongoing global conflicts, and this could adversely affect our and our suppliers' ability to maintain or enhance key cybersecurity and data protection measures. We have previously been, and may in the future become, the target of cyber-attacks by third parties seeking unauthorized access to our or our customers' data, systems, or infrastructure, or to disrupt our operations or ability to provide our services.

Additionally, it is also possible that unauthorized access to sensitive customer and business data may be obtained through inadequate use of security controls by our customers, suppliers or other vendors, using social engineering to cause an employee or contractor to install malware or exploiting known vulnerabilities. Like other businesses, we rely on hardware and software supplied by third-parties and, therefore, are susceptible to supply chain attacks. Such attacks are becoming increasingly common, and we may not be able to anticipate and prevent negative impacts from such an attack. If we are impacted by a supply chain attack, we could incur liability, our competitive position could be harmed and the further development and commercialization of our product and services could be hindered or delayed.

Recent cybersecurity incidents and compromises affecting large institutions, including an incident that affected us, suggest that the risk of such events is significant, even if privacy protection and security measures are implemented and enforced. A cyber-attack could result in a material disruption of our development programs and our business operations, whether due to a loss of our trade secrets or other proprietary information or other disruptions. These cyber-attacks could be carried out by threat actors of all types (including but not limited to nation states, organized crime, other criminal enterprises, individual actors and/or advanced persistent threat groups). In addition, we may experience intrusions on our physical premises by any of these threat actors. To the extent that any disruption or security breach were to result in a loss of, or damage to, our data or applications, or inappropriate disclosure of confidential or proprietary information, we could incur liability, incur significant costs associated with remediation and the implementation of additional security measures, including costs to deploy additional personnel and protection technologies, train employees, and engage third-party experts and consultants, and our competitive position could be harmed. Any breach, loss, or compromise of personal data may also subject us to civil fines and penalties, or claims for damages either under the General Data Protection Regulation (the “EU GDPR”), the EU GDPR as incorporated into United Kingdom law, and relevant member state law in the European Union, other foreign laws, and other relevant state and federal privacy laws in the United States.

Many governments have enacted laws requiring companies to notify individuals of data security incidents or unauthorized transfers involving certain types of personal data. In addition, the data processing agreement we execute with our customers contractually requires us to notify them of any personal data breach. Under payment card network rules and our contracts with our payment processors, if there is a data breach of payment resulting in the compromise of cardholder payment information that we store, or that is stored by our direct payment card processing vendors, we could be liable to the payment card issuing banks for their cost of issuing new cards and related expenses depending on the cause of such data breach. Data breaches and other data security compromises experienced by our competitors, by our customers or by us may lead to public disclosures, which may lead to widespread negative publicity. Any security compromise in our industry, whether actual or perceived, could harm our reputation, erode customer confidence in the effectiveness of our security measures, negatively impact our ability to attract new customers, cause existing customers to elect not to renew their subscriptions or subject us to third-party lawsuits, regulatory fines or other action or liability, which could materially and adversely affect our business and operating results.

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There can be no assurance that any limitations of liability provisions in our contracts for a security breach would be enforceable or adequate or would otherwise protect us from any such liabilities or damages with respect to any particular claim. We also cannot be sure that our existing insurance coverage will continue to be available on acceptable terms or will be available in sufficient amounts to cover one or more large claims, or that the insurer will not deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceed available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and operating results.

 

Risks Related to Intellectual Property

Our business may suffer if it is alleged or determined that our technology infringes the intellectual property rights of others.

The software industry is characterized by the existence of a large number of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and other intellectual and proprietary rights. Companies in the software industry, including those in marketing software, are often required to defend against litigation claims based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. Many of our competitors and other industry participants have been issued patents and/or have filed patent applications and may assert patent or other intellectual property rights within the industry. Moreover, in recent years, individuals and groups that are non-practicing entities, commonly referred to as “patent trolls,” have purchased patents and other intellectual property assets for the purpose of making claims of infringement in order to extract settlements. From time to time, we may receive threatening letters or notices or may be the subject of claims that our services and/or platform and underlying technology infringe or violate the intellectual property rights of others. Responding to such claims, regardless of their merit, can be time consuming, costly to defend in litigation, divert management’s attention and resources, damage our reputation and brand and cause us to incur significant expenses. Our technologies may not be able to withstand any third-party claims or rights against their use. Claims of intellectual property infringement might require us to redesign our application, delay releases, enter into costly settlement or license agreements or pay costly damage awards, or face a temporary or permanent injunction prohibiting us from marketing or selling our platform. If we cannot or do not license the infringed technology on reasonable terms or at all, or substitute similar technology from another source, our revenue and operating results could be adversely impacted. Additionally, our customers may not purchase our customer platform if they are concerned that they may infringe third-party intellectual property rights. The occurrence of any of these events may have a material adverse effect on our business.

In certain of our subscription agreements with customers, we agree to indemnify these customers against claims by a third party alleging infringement of a valid patent, registered copyright or registered trademark. However, whether or not a subscription agreement includes an indemnity obligation in favor of a customer, there can be no assurance that customers will not assert a common law indemnity claim or that any existing limitations of liability provisions in our contracts would be enforceable or adequate, or would otherwise protect us from any such liabilities or damages with respect to any particular claim. Our customers who are accused of intellectual property infringement may in the future seek indemnification from us under common law or other legal theories. If such claims are successful, or if we are required to indemnify or defend our customers from these or other claims, these matters could be disruptive to our business and management and have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.

If we fail to adequately protect our proprietary rights, in the United States and abroad, our competitive position could be impaired and we may lose valuable assets, experience reduced revenue and incur costly litigation to protect our rights.

Our success is dependent, in part, upon protecting our proprietary technology. We rely on a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, trade secret laws and contractual restrictions to establish and protect our proprietary rights in our products and services. However, the steps we take to protect our intellectual property may be inadequate. We will not be able to protect our intellectual property if we are unable to enforce our rights or if we do not detect unauthorized use of our intellectual property. Any of our trademarks or other intellectual property rights may be challenged by others or invalidated through administrative process or litigation. Furthermore, legal standards relating to the validity, enforceability and scope of protection of intellectual property rights are uncertain. Additionally, the intellectual property ownership and license rights, including copyright, surrounding AI technologies, which we are increasingly building into our product offerings, has not been fully addressed by U.S. courts or other federal or state laws or regulations, and the use or adoption of AI technologies in our products and services may expose us to copyright infringement or other intellectual property misappropriation claims. Despite our precautions, it may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy our technology and use information that we regard as proprietary to create products and services that compete with ours. Some license provisions protecting against unauthorized use, copying, transfer and disclosure of our offerings may be unenforceable under the laws of certain jurisdictions and foreign countries. In addition, the laws of some countries do not protect proprietary rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States.

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To the extent we expand our international activities, our exposure to unauthorized copying and use of our technology and proprietary information may increase.

We enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and consultants and enter into confidentiality agreements with the parties with whom we have strategic relationships and business alliances. No assurance can be given that these agreements will be effective in controlling access to and distribution of our products and proprietary information. Further, these agreements may not prevent our competitors from independently developing technologies that are substantially equivalent or superior to our platform and offerings.

We may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect our intellectual property rights. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce our intellectual property rights and to protect our trade secrets. Such litigation could be costly, time consuming and distracting to management and could result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property. Furthermore, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights. Our inability to protect our proprietary technology against unauthorized copying or use, as well as any costly litigation, could delay further sales or the implementation of our platform and offerings, impair the functionality of our platform and offerings, delay introductions of new features or enhancements, result in our substituting inferior or more costly technologies into our platform and offerings, or injure our reputation.

Our use of “open source” software could negatively affect our ability to offer our platform and subject us to possible litigation.

A substantial portion of our cloud-based platform incorporates so-called “open source” software, and we may incorporate additional open source software in the future. Open source software is generally freely accessible, usable and modifiable. Certain open source licenses may, in certain circumstances, require us to offer the components of our platform that incorporate the open source software for no cost, that we make available source code for modifications or derivative works we create based upon, incorporating or using the open source software and that we license such modifications or derivative works under the terms of the particular open source license. If an author or other third party that distributes open source software we use were to allege that we had not complied with the conditions of one or more of these licenses, we could be required to incur significant legal expenses defending against such allegations and could be subject to significant damages, including being enjoined from the offering of the components of our platform that contained the open source software and being required to comply with the foregoing conditions, which could disrupt our ability to offer the affected software. We could also be subject to suits by parties claiming ownership of what we believe to be open source software. Litigation could be costly for us to defend, have a negative effect on our operating results and financial condition and require us to devote additional research and development resources to change our products.

 

Risks Related to Government Regulation

We are subject to governmental regulation and other legal obligations, particularly related to privacy, data protection and information security, and our actual or perceived failure to comply with such obligations could harm our business. Compliance with such laws could also impair our efforts to maintain and expand our customer base and business lines, and thereby decrease our revenue.

Our handling of data across our products and services is subject to a variety of laws and regulations, including regulation by various government agencies, including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ("FTC"), and various state, local and foreign agencies. We collect personal data and other data from our customers, prospects, partners, and publicly available sources. We also handle personal data about our customers’ customers. We use this information to provide services to our customers, to support, expand and improve our business. We may also share customers’ personal data with third parties as authorized by the customer or as described in our privacy policy.

The U.S. federal and various state and foreign governments have adopted or proposed limitations on the collection, processing, distribution, use, storage and safeguarding of personal data. In the United States, the FTC and many state attorneys general are applying federal and state privacy and consumer protection laws to impose standards for the online collection, use and dissemination of personal and other data. However, these obligations may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent from one jurisdiction to another and may conflict with other requirements or our practices. Any failure or perceived failure by us to comply with privacy or data security laws, policies, legal obligations or industry standards or any security incident that results in the unauthorized, disclosure, release or transfer of personal data or other customer data may result in governmental enforcement actions, litigation, fines and penalties and/or adverse publicity, and could cause our customers to lose trust in us, which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business.

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Laws and regulations governing privacy, data protection and cybersecurity are rapidly evolving, and changes to such laws and regulations could require us to change features of our platform or restrict our customers’ ability to collect and use email addresses, page viewing data and other personal data, which may reduce demand for our platform. Our failure to comply with federal, state and foreign privacy and cybersecurity laws and regulations could harm our ability to successfully operate our business and pursue our business goals.

For example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (the “CCPA”), as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (the “CPRA”), among other things, require covered companies to provide new disclosures to California residents and afford such individuals the ability to opt out of the sales or sharing of their personal data. The CCPA may require us to modify our data collection or processing practices and policies and to potentially incur substantial costs and expenses in an effort to comply. In addition to increasing our potential exposure to regulatory enforcement, the CCPA also provides for violations and a limited private right of action, which may increase our exposure to civil litigation.

Other states, including Virginia, Colorado, Utah, Connecticut, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, Tennessee, and Texas, among others, have passed comprehensive privacy and data security laws, which impose obligations on covered businesses similar – but not identical – to those under the CCPA. Some of these laws entered into force in 2023, and others will enter into force in 2024 and beyond. A number of other states have proposed similar or sector specific privacy legislation,; and the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that may preempt some or all of such U.S. state privacy laws, providing a more robust private right of action. The evolving complexity of privacy and data security legislation in the U.S. may complicate our compliance efforts and further increase our risk of regulatory enforcement, penalties and litigation.

In addition, many foreign jurisdictions in which we do business, including the European Union, Japan, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and others have laws and regulations dealing with the collection and use of personal data obtained from their residents, which are more restrictive in certain respects than those in the U.S. Laws and regulations in these jurisdictions apply broadly to the collection, use, storage, disclosure and security of personal data that identifies or may be used to identify an individual. In relevant part, these foreign laws and regulations may affect our ability to engage in lead generation activities by imposing heightened requirements, such as affirmative opt-ins or other consent prior to sending commercial correspondence, obtaining leads or engaging in electronic tracking activities that aid our marketing and business intelligence. We may be required to modify our policies, procedures, and data processing measures in order to address requirements under these or other privacy, data protection, or cyber security regimes, and may face claims, litigation, investigations, or other proceedings regarding them and may incur related liabilities, expenses, costs, and operational losses.

In connection with the operation of some of our business lines, such as business intelligence services, we collect, process and share business contact information or other personal data individuals make available in their professional capacity. We may be subject to additional requirements under privacy and data protection laws that could lead to additional compliance costs, regulatory scrutiny, and reputational risks that may affect our business. For example, we may be required to send notifications to individuals and respond to higher volumes of data privacy requests, which may require substantial costs and expenses, or reduce the potential value of our business intelligence services. We may also receive data from third-party vendors (e.g., data brokers) in connection with such services. While we have implemented certain contractual measures with such vendors to protect our interests, we are ultimately unable to verify with complete certainty the source of such data, how it was received, and that such information was collected and is being shared with us in compliance with all applicable data privacy laws. Furthermore, the uncertain and shifting regulatory environment and trust climate may cause concerns regarding data privacy and may cause our vendors, customers, users, or our customers’ customers to decline to provide the data necessary to allow us to offer some of our services to our customers and users effectively, or could prompt individuals to opt out of our collection of their personal data. Concern regarding our use of the personal data collected when performing our services could keep prospective customers from subscribing to our services.

Within the European Union, the EU GDPR, and in the United Kingdom, the EU GDPR as incorporated into the laws of the United Kingdom (the “UK GDPR” together with the EU GDPR, the “GDPR”), impose heightened obligations and risk upon our business and may substantially increase the penalties to which we could be subject in the event of any non-compliance. Non-compliance with the GDPR and the related national data protection laws of the European Union Member States may result in monetary penalties of up to €20 million (£17.5 million) or 4% of worldwide annual revenue, whichever is higher.

The proliferation of privacy and data protection laws has heightened risks and uncertainties concerning cross-border transfers of personal data and other data, which could impose significant compliance costs and expenses on our business, increase our potential exposure to regulatory enforcement and/or litigation, and have a negative effect on our existing business and on our ability to attract and retain new customers. To enable the transfer of personal data outside of the European Union or United Kingdom, adequate safeguards must be implemented in compliance with data protection laws. On June 4, 2021, the European Commission published new versions of its Standard Contractual Clauses (“SCCs”), which are required for all transfers of personal data from the European Union to third countries (including the U.S). The United Kingdom is not subject to the new SCCs but has its own equivalent, being the international data transfer agreement and/or UK Addendum (“IDTAs”). The IDTAs must be entered into for new contracts, but allow for a transition period until March 21, 2024 for existing contracts.

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Our customer agreements include the updated SCCs and UK IDTAs. We are in the process of transitioning to the IDTAs for existing contracts, and doing so will require significant effort and cost. Under the new SCCs and IDTAs, companies are also required to assess the risk of a data transfer on a case-by-case basis by undertaking a transfer impact assessment, and may be required to adopt additional measures to accomplish transfers of personal data to United States and other third countries. There continue to be concerns about whether the SCCs will face additional challenges.

On July 10, 2023, the European Commission approved the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (“DPF”) to support transfers of personal data from the EU to companies in the U.S. Because we have maintained our certification under the previously invalidated Privacy Shield, we have now automatically become subject to the DPF and are required to maintain policies and procedures to comply with the DPF principles. We may be subject to regulatory enforcement by the FTC if we are found to be noncompliant with any of the DPF principles, and this regulatory enforcement may lead to significant civil penalties.

Until the remaining legal uncertainties regarding SCCs, DPF and other transfer mechanisms are settled, we will continue to face uncertainty as to whether our customers will be permitted to transfer personal data to the United States for processing by us as part of our platform services. Our customers may view data transfer mechanisms as being too costly, too burdensome, too legally uncertain or otherwise objectionable and therefore decide not to do business with us.

We publicly post documentation regarding our practices concerning the collection, processing, use and disclosure of data. Although we endeavor to comply with our published policies and documentation, we may at times fail to do so or be alleged to have failed to do so. Any failure or perceived failure by us to comply with our privacy policies or any applicable privacy, security or data protection, information security or consumer-protection related laws, regulations, orders or industry standards could expose us to costly litigation, significant awards, fines or judgments, civil and/or criminal penalties or negative publicity, and could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. The publication of our privacy policy and other documentation that provide promises and assurances about privacy and security can subject us to potential state and federal action if they are found to be deceptive, unfair, or misrepresentative of our actual practices, which could, individually or in the aggregate, materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

If our privacy or data security measures fail to comply with current or future laws and regulations, we may be subject to claims, legal proceedings or other actions by individuals or governmental authorities based on privacy or data protection regulations and our commitments to customers or others, as well as negative publicity and a potential loss of business. Moreover, if future laws and regulations limit our subscribers’ ability to use and share personal data or our ability to store, process and share personal data, demand for our solutions could decrease, our costs could increase, and our business, results of operations and financial condition could be harmed.

Separately, as the regulatory framework for machine learning technology and AI evolves, it is possible that new laws and regulations will be adopted, or that existing laws and regulations may be interpreted in ways that would affect our business and the ways in which we use AI and machine learning technology, our financial condition and our results of operations, including as a result of the cost to comply with such laws or regulations. Further, potential government regulation related to AI use and ethics may also increase the burden and cost of research and development in this area, and failure to properly remediate AI usage or ethics issues may cause public confidence in AI to be undermined, which could slow adoption of AI in our products and services.

We could face liability, or our reputation might be harmed, as a result of the activities of our customers, the content of their websites or the data they store on our servers.

As a provider of a cloud-based inbound marketing, sales and customer service software platform, we may be subject to potential liability for the activities of our customers on or in connection with the data they store on our servers. Although our customer terms of use prohibit illegal use of our services by our customers and permit us to take down websites or take other appropriate actions for illegal use, customers may nonetheless engage in prohibited activities or upload or store content with us in violation of applicable law or the customer’s own policies, which could subject us to liability or harm our reputation. Furthermore, customers may upload, store, or use content on our customer platform that may violate our policy on acceptable use which prohibits content that is threatening, abusive, harassing, deceptive, false, misleading, vulgar, obscene, or indecent. While such content may not be illegal, use of our customer platform for such content could harm our reputation resulting in a loss of business.

Several U.S. federal statutes may apply to us with respect to various customer activities:

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Although these statutes and case law in the United States have generally shielded us from liability for customer activities to date, court rulings in pending or future litigation may narrow the scope of protection afforded us under these laws. In addition, laws governing these activities are unsettled in many international jurisdictions, or may prove difficult or impossible for us to comply with in some international jurisdictions. Also, notwithstanding the exculpatory language of these bodies of law, we may become involved in complaints and lawsuits which, even if ultimately resolved in our favor, add cost to our doing business and may divert management’s time and attention. Finally, other existing bodies of law, including the criminal laws of various states, may be deemed to apply or new statutes or regulations may be adopted in the future, any of which could expose us to further liability and increase our costs of doing business.

Additionally, Payments, our end-to-end payment solution built within Commerce Hub, are susceptible to potentially illegal or improper uses, including money laundering, terrorist financing, fraudulent or illegal sales of goods or services, piracy of software, movies, music, and other copyrighted or trademarked information, bank fraud, securities fraud, pyramid or ponzi schemes, or the facilitation of other illegal or improper activity. While we engage a third party as our registered payment facilitator, the use of Payments for illegal or improper uses may subject us to claims (including claims brought by our third-party payment processor), government and regulatory requests, inquiries, or investigations that could result in liability, and harm our reputation. Moreover, certain activity that may be legal in one jurisdiction may be illegal in another jurisdiction, and a merchant may be found responsible for intentionally or inadvertently importing or exporting illegal goods, resulting in liability for us. Owners of intellectual property rights or government authorities may seek to bring legal action against providers of payments solutions, including Payments, that are peripherally involved in the sale of infringing or allegedly infringing items. Any threatened or resulting claims could result in reputational harm, and any resulting liabilities, loss of transaction volume, or increased costs could harm our business.

If Payments is used for illegal or improper uses, we may incur substantial losses as a result of claims from merchants and their buyers, including consumers. Allowances for transaction losses that we have established may be insufficient to cover incurred losses. Moreover, if measures to detect and reduce the risk of fraud are not effective and our loss rate is higher than anticipated, Payments and our business could be negatively impacted.

The standards that private entities use to regulate the use of email have in the past interfered with, and may in the future interfere with, the effectiveness of our customer platform and our ability to conduct business.

Our customers rely on email to communicate with their existing or prospective customers. Various private entities attempt to regulate the use of email for commercial solicitation. These entities often advocate standards of conduct or practice that significantly exceed current legal requirements and classify certain email solicitations that comply with current legal requirements as spam. Some of these entities maintain “blacklists” of companies and individuals, and the websites, internet service providers and internet protocol addresses associated with those entities or individuals that do not adhere to those standards of conduct or practices for commercial email solicitations that the blacklisting entity believes are appropriate.

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If a company’s internet protocol addresses are listed by a blacklisting entity, emails sent from those addresses may be blocked if they are sent to any internet domain or internet address that subscribes to the blacklisting entity’s service or purchases its blacklist.

From time to time, some of our internet protocol addresses may become listed with one or more blacklisting entities due to the messaging practices of our customers. There can be no guarantee that we will be able to successfully remove ourselves from those lists. Blacklisting of this type could interfere with our ability to market our customer platform and services and communicate with our customers and, because we fulfill email delivery on behalf of our customers, could undermine the effectiveness of our customers’ email marketing campaigns, all of which could have a material negative impact on our business and results of operations.

Existing federal, state and foreign laws regulate Internet tracking software, the senders of commercial emails and text messages, website owners and other activities, and could impact the use of our customer platform and potentially subject us to regulatory enforcement or private litigation.

Certain aspects of how our customers utilize our platform are subject to regulations in the United States, European Union and elsewhere. In recent years, U.S. and European lawmakers and regulators have expressed concern over the use of third-party cookies or web beacons for online behavioral advertising, and legislation adopted recently in the European Union requires informed consent for the placement of a cookie on a user’s device. Regulation of cookies and web beacons may lead to restrictions on our activities, such as efforts to understand users’ Internet usage. New and expanding “Do Not Track” regulations have recently been enacted or proposed that protect users’ right to choose whether or not to be tracked online. These regulations seek, among other things, to allow end users to have greater control over the use of private information collected online, to forbid the collection or use of online information, to demand a business to comply with their choice to opt out of such collection or use, and to place limits upon the disclosure of information to third-party websites. These policies could have a significant impact on the operation of our customer platform and could impair our attractiveness to customers, which would harm our business.

Many of our customers and potential customers in the healthcare, financial services and other industries are subject to substantial regulation regarding their collection, use and protection of data and may be the subject of further regulation in the future. Accordingly, these laws or significant new laws or regulations or changes in, or repeals of, existing laws, regulations or governmental policy may change the way these customers do business and may require us to implement additional features or offer additional contractual terms to satisfy customer and regulatory requirements, or could cause the demand for and sales of our customer platform to decrease and adversely impact our financial results.

In addition, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 ("CAN-SPAM Act"), establishes certain requirements for commercial email messages and specifies penalties for the transmission of commercial email messages that are intended to deceive the recipient as to source or content. The CAN-SPAM Act, among other things, obligates the sender of commercial emails to provide recipients with the ability to opt out of receiving future commercial emails from the sender. The ability of our customers’ message recipients to opt out of receiving commercial emails may minimize the effectiveness of the email components of our customer platform. In addition, certain states and foreign jurisdictions, such as Australia, Canada and the European Union, have enacted laws that regulate sending email, and some of these laws are more restrictive than U.S. laws. For example, some foreign laws prohibit sending unsolicited email unless the recipient has provided the sender advance consent to receipt of such email, or in other words has “opted-in” to receiving it. A requirement that recipients opt into, or the ability of recipients to opt out of, receiving commercial emails may minimize the effectiveness of our platform.

While these laws and regulations generally govern our customers’ use of our customer platform, we may be subject to certain laws as a data processor on behalf of, or as a business associate of, our customers. For example, laws and regulations governing the collection, use and disclosure of personal data include, in the United States, rules and regulations promulgated under the authority of the Federal Trade Commission, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and state breach notification laws, and internationally, the GDPR and other privacy and data protection laws. If we were found to be in violation of any of these laws or regulations as a result of government enforcement or private litigation, we could be subjected to civil and criminal sanctions, including both monetary fines and injunctive action that could force us to change our business practices, all of which could adversely affect our financial performance and significantly harm our reputation and our business.

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We are subject to governmental export controls and economic sanctions laws that could impair our ability to compete in international markets and subject us to liability if we are not in full compliance with applicable laws.

Our business activities are subject to various restrictions under U.S. export controls and trade and economic sanctions laws, including the U.S. Commerce Department’s Export Administration Regulations and economic and trade sanctions regulations maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. If we fail to comply with these laws and regulations, we and certain of our employees could be subject to civil or criminal penalties and reputational harm. Obtaining the necessary authorizations, including any required license, for a particular transaction may be time-consuming, is not guaranteed, and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities. Furthermore, U.S. export control laws and economic sanctions laws prohibit certain transactions with U.S. embargoed or sanctioned countries, governments, persons and entities. These sanctions laws with which we must comply may also change rapidly from time to time as a result of geopolitical events, such as the recent imposition of sanctions on Russia as a result of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Although we take precautions to prevent transactions with U.S. sanction targets, the possibility exists that we could inadvertently provide our solutions to persons prohibited by U.S. sanctions. This could result in negative consequences to us, including government investigations, penalties and reputational harm.

 

Risks Related to Taxation

We may be subject to additional obligations to collect and remit sales tax and other taxes, and we may be subject to tax liability for past sales, which could harm our business.

State, local, and non-U.S. jurisdictions have differing rules and regulations governing sales, use, value added, digital service, and other taxes, and these rules and regulations are subject to varying interpretations that may change over time. In particular, the applicability of such taxes to our customer platform in various jurisdictions can be unclear. Further, these jurisdictions’ rules regarding tax nexus are complex and vary significantly. As a result, we could face the possibility of tax assessments and audits, and our liability for these taxes and associated penalties could exceed our original estimates. A successful assertion that we should be collecting additional sales, use, value added or other taxes in those jurisdictions where we have not historically done so and do not accrue for such taxes could result in substantial tax liabilities and related penalties for past sales, discourage customers from purchasing our application or otherwise harm our business and operating results.

Changes in tax laws or regulations that are applied adversely to us or our customers could increase the costs of our customer platform and adversely impact our business.

New income, sales, use or other tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations or ordinances could be enacted at any time. Any new taxes could adversely affect our domestic and international business operations, and our business and financial performance. Further, existing tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations or ordinances could be interpreted, changed, modified or applied adversely to us. These events could require us or our customers to pay additional tax amounts on a prospective or retroactive basis, as well as require us or our customers to pay fines and/or penalties and interest for past amounts deemed to be due. For example, under Section 174 of the Code, in taxable years beginning after December 31, 2021, expenses that are incurred for research and development in the United States will be capitalized and amortized, which may have an adverse effect on our cash flow. If we raise our prices to offset the costs of these changes, existing and potential future customers may elect not to continue or purchase our customer platform in the future. Additionally, new, changed, modified or newly interpreted or applied tax laws could increase our customers’ and our compliance, operating and other costs, as well as the costs of our platform. Any or all of these events could adversely impact our business, cash flows and financial performance. Furthermore, as our employees continue to work remotely from geographic locations across the United States and internationally, we may become subject to additional taxes and our compliance burdens with respect to the tax laws of additional jurisdictions may increase.

We are a multinational organization faced with increasingly complex tax issues in many jurisdictions, and we could be obligated to pay additional taxes in various jurisdictions.

As a multinational organization, we may be subject to taxation in several jurisdictions around the world with increasingly complex tax laws, the application of which can be uncertain. The amount of taxes we pay in these jurisdictions could increase substantially as a result of changes in the applicable tax principles, including increased tax rates, new tax laws or revised interpretations of existing tax laws and precedents, or challenges to our tax positions by tax authorities, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our liquidity, financial condition or operating results. In addition, the authorities in these jurisdictions could review our tax returns and impose additional tax, interest and penalties, and the authorities could claim that various withholding requirements apply to us or our subsidiaries or assert that benefits of tax treaties are not available to us or our subsidiaries, or assert that we are subject to tax in a jurisdiction where we believe we have not established a taxable nexus, often referred to as a “permanent establishment” under international tax treaties, any of which could have a material impact on us, our financial condition or our operating results.

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We may not be able to utilize a significant portion of our net operating loss carryforwards, which could adversely affect our profitability.

We have incurred losses during our history and we may never achieve profitability. As of December 31, 2023, we had $861.4 million of U.S. federal and $740.0 million of state net operating loss carryforwards due to prior period losses, which have an indefinite carryforward and begin to expire in 2025 for state purposes. The state net operating loss carryforwards could expire unused and be unavailable to offset future income tax liabilities, which could adversely affect our profitability. In addition, under Section 382 and Section 383 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, which we refer to as the Code, our ability to utilize net operating loss carryforwards or other tax attributes, such as research tax credits, in any taxable year may be further limited if we experience an “ownership change.” An ownership change generally occurs if one or more stockholders or groups of stockholders who own at least 5% of our stock increase their ownership by more than 50 percentage points over their lowest ownership percentage (by value) within a rolling three-year period. Similar rules may apply under state tax laws. We may have experienced an ownership change in the past, and future issuances of our stock could cause an ownership change. It is possible that any such ownership change could have a material effect on the use of our net operating loss carryforwards or other tax attributes accrued prior to such ownership change, which could adversely affect our profitability.
 

Risks Related to Our Operating Results and Financial Condition

We have a history of losses and may not achieve profitability in the future.

We generated net losses of $176.3 million in 2023, $112.7 million in 2022, and $77.8 million in 2021. As of December 31, 2023, we had an accumulated deficit of $818.7 million. We will need to generate and sustain increased revenue levels in future periods to become profitable, and, even if we do, we may not be able to maintain or increase our level of profitability. We have spent and intend to continue to expend significant funds on our marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and content management operations, develop and enhance our customer platform, scale our data center infrastructure and services capabilities and expand into new markets. Our efforts to grow our business may be more costly than we expect, and we may not be able to increase our revenue enough to offset our higher operating expenses. We may incur significant losses in the future for a number of reasons, including the other risks described in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications and delays and other unknown events. If we are unable to achieve and sustain profitability, the market price of our common stock may significantly decrease.

From time to time, we may invest funds in social impact investment funds, and may receive no return on our investment or lose our entire investment.

From time to time, we may invest in social impact investment funds. As of December 31, 2023, we have invested $8.5 million in the Black Economic Development Fund and $7.5 million in support of Minority Depository Institutions to help close the racial wealth, health and opportunity gap. There is no guarantee as to the performance of this investment or any similar investments we make in the future. Depending on the performance of this investment and future investments we may make, we may not receive any return on our investment or we may lose our entire investment, which could have an adverse effect on our business.

We may experience quarterly fluctuations in our operating results due to a number of factors, which makes our future results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below expectations or our guidance.

Our quarterly operating results have fluctuated in the past and are expected to fluctuate in the future due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control. As a result, our past results may not be indicative of our future performance, and comparing our operating results on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful. In addition to the other risks described in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, factors that may affect our quarterly operating results include the following:

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We may not be able to accurately forecast the amount and mix of future subscriptions, revenue and expenses and, as a result, our operating results may fall below our estimates or the expectations of public market analysts and investors. If our revenue or operating results fall below the expectations of investors or securities analysts, or below any guidance we may provide, the price of our common stock could decline.

If we do not accurately predict subscription renewal rates or otherwise fail to forecast our revenue accurately, or if we fail to match our expenditures with corresponding revenue, our operating results could be adversely affected.

Because our recent growth has resulted in the rapid expansion of our business, we do not have a long history upon which to base forecasts of renewal rates with customers or future operating revenue. As a result, our operating results in future reporting periods may be significantly below the expectations of the public market, equity research analysts or investors, which could harm the price of our common stock.
 

Changes in accounting standards and subjective assumptions, estimates and judgments by management related to complex accounting matters could significantly affect our financial condition and results of operations.

 

We apply accounting principles and related pronouncements, implementation guidelines and interpretations to a wide range of matters that are relevant to our business, are highly complex and involve subjective assumptions, estimates and judgments by our management. Changes in these rules or their interpretation, or changes in underlying assumptions, estimates or judgments by our management, could significantly change our reported or expected financial performance.

 

Risks Related to Our Notes

Servicing our debt may require a significant amount of cash. We may not have sufficient cash flow from our business to pay our indebtedness, and we may not have the ability to raise the funds necessary to settle for cash conversions of the Notes or to repurchase the Notes for cash upon a fundamental change, which could adversely affect our business and results of operations.

In June 2020, we incurred indebtedness in the aggregate principal amount of $460.0 million in connection with the issuance of our 0.375% convertible senior notes due June 1, 2025 (the “2025 Notes”). Our ability to make scheduled payments of the principal of, to pay interest on or to refinance our indebtedness, including the Notes, depends on our future performance, which is subject to economic, financial, competitive and other factors beyond our control. Our business may not continue to generate cash flow from operations in the future sufficient to service our debt and make necessary capital expenditures. If we are unable to generate such cash flow, we may be required to adopt one or more alternatives, such as selling assets, restructuring debt or obtaining additional debt financing or equity capital on terms that may be onerous or highly dilutive.

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Our ability to refinance any future indebtedness will depend on the capital markets and our financial condition at such time. We may not be able to engage in any of these activities or engage in these activities on desirable terms, which could result in a default on our debt obligations. In addition, any of our future debt agreements may contain restrictive covenants that may prohibit us from adopting any of these alternatives. Our failure to comply with these covenants could result in an event of default which, if not cured or waived, could result in the acceleration of our debt.

In addition, holders of the Notes have the right to require us to repurchase their Notes upon the occurrence of a fundamental change at a fundamental change repurchase price equal to 100% of the principal amount of the Notes to be repurchased, plus accrued and unpaid interest, if any. Upon conversion of the Notes, unless we elect to deliver solely shares of our common stock to settle such conversion (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we will be required to make cash payments in respect of the Notes being converted. We may not have enough available cash or be able to obtain financing at the time we are required to make repurchases of Notes surrendered therefor or Notes being converted. In addition, our ability to repurchase the Notes or to pay cash upon conversions of the Notes may be limited by law, by regulatory authority or by agreements governing our future indebtedness. Our failure to repurchase Notes at a time when the repurchase is required by the indenture governing the notes or to pay any cash payable on future conversions of the Notes as required by such indenture would constitute a default under such indenture. A default under the indenture or the fundamental change itself could also lead to a default under agreements governing our future indebtedness. If the repayment of the related indebtedness were to be accelerated after any applicable notice or grace periods, we may not have sufficient funds to repay the indebtedness and repurchase the Notes or make cash payments upon conversions thereof.

In addition, our indebtedness, combined with our other financial obligations and contractual commitments, could have other important consequences. For example, it could:

Any of these factors could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. In addition, if we incur additional indebtedness, the risks related to our business and our ability to service or repay our indebtedness would increase.

The conditional conversion feature of the Notes, if triggered, may adversely affect our financial condition and operating results.

In the event the conditional conversion feature of the 2025 Notes is triggered, the holders thereof will be entitled to convert the 2025 Notes at any time during specified periods at their option. Because the last reported sale price of the Company’s common stock for at least 20 trading days during the period of 30 consecutive trading days ending on the last trading day of the calendar quarter ended December 31, 2023 was equal to or greater than 130% of the applicable conversion price on each applicable trading day, the 2025 Notes are convertible at the option of the holders thereof during the calendar quarter ending December 31, 2023. As of February 9, 2024, the Company has not received any material conversion notices with respect to the 2025 Notes. Whether the Notes that remain outstanding will be convertible following the calendar quarter ended December 31, 2023 will depend on the continued satisfaction of this condition or another conversion condition in the future. If one or more holders elect to convert their Notes, unless we elect to satisfy our conversion obligation by delivering solely shares of our common stock (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we would be required to settle a portion or all of our conversion obligation through the payment of cash, which could adversely affect our liquidity. In addition, even if holders do not elect to convert their Notes, we could be required under applicable accounting rules to reclassify all or a portion of the outstanding principal of the Notes as a current rather than long-term liability, which would result in a material reduction of our net working capital.

The accounting method for convertible debt securities that may be settled in cash, such as the Notes, could have a material effect on our reported financial results.

In August 2020, the FASB issued guidance simplifying the accounting for convertible instruments by reducing the number of accounting models for convertible debt instruments and convertible preferred stock. The new standard eliminates requirements to separately account for liability and equity components of such convertible debt instruments and requires the use of the if-converted method for calculating the diluted earnings per share for convertible debt instruments. We adopted the guidance on January 1, 2022, using the modified retrospective method.

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Future interest expense of the convertible notes will be lower as a result of adoption of this guidance and net loss per share will be computed using the if-converted method for these securities.

The if-converted method assumes that all of the Notes were converted solely into shares of common stock at the beginning of the reporting period, unless the result would be anti-dilutive. The application of the if-converted method may reduce our reported diluted net income per share to the extent we are profitable, and accounting standards may change in the future in a manner that may otherwise adversely affect our diluted net income per share.

We are subject to counterparty risk with respect to the Capped Call Options.

 

In connection with the offering of the 2025 Notes, we purchased capped call options (“Capped Call Options”) with respect to our common stock for $50.6 million. The counterparties to the Capped Call Options are financial institutions, and we will be subject to the risk that one or more of the counterparties may default, fail to perform or exercise their termination rights under the Capped Call Options. Global economic conditions have, from time to time, resulted in the actual or perceived failure or financial difficulties of many financial institutions. If a counterparty to the Capped Call Options becomes subject to insolvency proceedings, we will become an unsecured creditor in those proceedings with a claim equal to our exposure at the time under such transaction. In addition, upon a default, failure to perform or a termination of the Capped Call Options by a counterparty, we may suffer more dilution than we currently anticipate with respect to our common stock. We can provide no assurances as to the financial stability or viability of the counterparties.

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Risks Related to Our Common Stock

Our stock price may be volatile and you may be unable to sell your shares at or above the price you purchased them.

The trading prices of the securities of technology companies, including providers of software via the cloud-based model, have been highly volatile. Since shares of our common stock were sold in our initial public offering in October 2014 at a price of $25.00 per share, our stock price has ranged from $25.79 to $866.00 through December 31, 2023. The market price of our common stock may fluctuate significantly in response to numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control, including:

In addition, the stock markets have experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations that have affected and continue to affect the market prices of equity securities of many technology companies. Stock prices of many technology companies have fluctuated in a manner unrelated or disproportionate to the operating performance of those companies.

In the past, stockholders have instituted securities class action litigation following periods of market volatility. If we were to become involved in securities litigation, it could subject us to substantial costs, divert resources and the attention of management from our business and adversely affect our business.

If we fail to maintain an effective system of disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting, our ability to produce timely and accurate financial statements or comply with applicable regulations could be impaired.

As a public company we are subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (the “Sarbanes-Oxley Act”), the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the “Dodd-Frank Act”), and the rules and regulations of the New York Stock Exchange (the “NYSE”). We expect that compliance with these rules and regulations will continue to increase our legal, accounting and financial compliance costs, make some activities more difficult, time consuming and costly, and place significant strain on our personnel, systems and resources.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires, among other things, that we assess the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting annually and the effectiveness of our disclosure controls and procedures quarterly.

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In particular, Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (“Section 404”), requires us to perform system and process evaluation and testing of our internal control over financial reporting to allow management to report on, and our independent registered public accounting firm to attest to, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. Our compliance with applicable provisions of Section 404 requires that we incur substantial accounting expenses and expend significant management time on compliance-related issues as we implement additional corporate governance practices and comply with reporting requirements. Moreover, if we are not able to comply with the requirements of Section 404 applicable to us in a timely manner, or if we or our independent registered public accounting firm identifies deficiencies in our internal control over financial reporting that are deemed to be material weaknesses, the market price of our stock could decline and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by the SEC or other regulatory authorities, which would require additional financial and management resources.

Furthermore, investor perceptions of our company may suffer if deficiencies are found, and this could cause a decline in the market price of our stock. Irrespective of compliance with Section 404, any failure of our internal control over financial reporting could have a material adverse effect on our stated operating results and harm our reputation. If we are unable to implement these requirements effectively or efficiently, it could harm our operations, financial reporting, or financial results and could result in an adverse opinion on our internal controls from our independent registered public accounting firm. In addition, as a result of our hybrid culture, many of our employees – including those critical to maintaining an effective system of disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting – are working, and are expected to continue to work, in a remote environment and not in the office environment from which they have historically performed their duties. We have limited experience maintaining effective control systems with our employees working in remote environments, and risks that we have not contemplated may arise and result in our failure to maintain effective disclosure controls or internal control over financial reporting.

Anti-takeover provisions in our charter documents and Delaware law may delay or prevent an acquisition of our company.

Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation, amended and restated bylaws and Delaware law contain provisions that may have the effect of delaying or preventing a change in control of us or changes in our management. Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and bylaws include provisions that:

These provisions, alone or together, could delay or prevent hostile takeovers and changes in control or changes in our management.

In addition, because we are incorporated in Delaware, we are governed by the provisions of Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, which limits the ability of stockholders owning in excess of 15% of our outstanding voting stock to merge or combine with us in certain circumstances.

Any provision of our amended and restated certificate of incorporation or amended and restated bylaws or Delaware law that has the effect of delaying or deterring a change in control could limit the opportunity for our stockholders to receive a premium for their shares of our common stock, and could also affect the price that some investors are willing to pay for our common stock.

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General Risks

Catastrophic events could disrupt our business and adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations.

We rely on our network infrastructure and enterprise applications, internal technology systems and website for our development, marketing, operations, support, hosted services and sales activities. In addition, some of our businesses rely on third-party hosted services, and we do not control the operation of third-party data center facilities serving our customers from around the world, which increases our vulnerability. A disruption, infiltration or failure of these systems or third-party hosted services in the event of a major earthquake, fire, flood, tsunami or other weather event, power loss, telecommunications failure, software or hardware malfunctions, pandemics (such as the COVID-19 pandemic), cyber-attack, war, terrorist attack or other catastrophic event that we do not adequately address, could cause system interruptions, reputational harm, loss of intellectual property, delays in our product development, lengthy interruptions in our services, breaches of data security and loss of critical data. Any of these events could prevent us from fulfilling our customer demands or could negatively impact a country or region in which we sell our products, which could in turn decrease that country’s or region’s demand for our products. A catastrophic event that results in the destruction or disruption of any of our data centers or our critical business or information technology systems could severely affect our ability to conduct normal business operations and, as a result, our future operating results could be adversely affected. The adverse effects of any such catastrophic event would be exacerbated if experienced at the same time as another unexpected and adverse event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The occurrence of regional epidemics or a global pandemic, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, may have an adverse effect on how we and our customers operate our businesses and our operating and financial results. Our operations may in the future be negatively affected by a range of external factors related to the pandemic that are not within our control, including the emergence and spread of more transmissible variants and the degree of transmissibility and severity thereof. The extent to which global pandemics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, impact our financial condition or results of operations will depend on factors, such as the duration and scope of the pandemic, as well as whether there is a material impact on the businesses or productivity of our customers, partners, employee, suppliers and other partners. To the extent that a pandemic, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, harms our business and results of operations, many of the other risks described in this “Risk Factors” section, may be heightened.

Failure to comply with laws and regulations could harm our business.

Our business is subject to regulation by various federal, state, local and foreign governmental agencies, including agencies responsible for monitoring and enforcing employment and labor laws, workplace safety, environmental laws, consumer protection laws, anti-bribery laws, import/export controls, federal securities laws and tax laws and regulations. In certain jurisdictions, these regulatory requirements may be more stringent than those in the United States. Noncompliance with applicable regulations or requirements could subject us to investigations, sanctions, mandatory recalls, enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, fines, damages, civil and criminal penalties or injunctions.

Our ability to raise capital in the future may be limited, and our failure to raise capital when needed could prevent us from growing.

Our business and operations may consume resources faster than we anticipate. In the future, we may need to raise additional funds to invest in future growth opportunities. Additional financing may not be available on favorable terms, if at all. In addition, recent volatility in capital markets and lower market prices for many securities may affect our ability to access new capital through sales of shares of our common stock or issuance of indebtedness, which may materially harm our liquidity, limit our ability to grow our business, pursue acquisitions or improve our operating infrastructure and restrict our ability to compete in our markets.

If adequate funds are not available on acceptable terms, we may be unable to invest in future growth opportunities, which could seriously harm our business and operating results. If we incur debt, the debt holders would have rights senior to common stockholders to make claims on our assets, and the terms of any debt could restrict our operations, including our ability to pay dividends on our common stock. Furthermore, if we issue equity securities, stockholders will experience dilution, and the new equity securities could have rights senior to those of our common stock. The Notes are and any additional equity or equity-linked financings would be dilutive to our stockholders. Because our decision to issue securities in any future offering will depend on market conditions and other factors beyond our control, we cannot predict or estimate the amount, timing or nature of our future offerings. As a result, our stockholders bear the risk of our future securities offerings reducing the market price of our common stock and diluting their interest.

 

 

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Climate change may have a long-term impact on our business

While we seek to partner with organizations that mitigate their business risks associated with climate change, we recognize that there are inherent risks wherever business is conducted. Any of our primary locations may be vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. For example, our offices globally may experience climate-related events at an increasing frequency, including drought, water scarcity, heat waves, cold waves, wildfires and resultant air quality impacts and power shutoffs associated with wildfire prevention. While this danger has a low-assessed risk of disrupting normal business operations, it has the potential to disrupt employees’ abilities to commute to work or to work from home and stay connected effectively. Furthermore, it is more difficult to mitigate the impact of these events on our employees to the extent they work from home. Climate-related events, including the increasing frequency of extreme weather events and their impact on the U.S.’s, Europe’s and other major regions’ critical infrastructure, have the potential to disrupt our business, our third-party suppliers and/or the business of our customers, and may cause us to experience higher attrition, losses and additional costs to maintain or resume operations. Regulatory developments, changing market dynamics and stakeholder expectations regarding climate change may impact our business, financial condition and results of operations. To inform our disclosures and take potential action as appropriate, we are working to align our reporting with emerging disclosure and accounting standards such as the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and the Global Reporting Initiative as well as potential new disclosure requirements from regulators such as the SEC.

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ITEM 1B. UNRESOLVED STAFF COMMENTS

None.

 

ITEM 1C. CYBERSECURITY

Cybersecurity represents an important component of our overall approach to business strategy, risk management and financial oversight. Our board recognizes the critical importance of maintaining the trust and confidence of our customers, business partners and employees, and is actively involved in oversight of our risk management program. The board performs this oversight function at the full board level, as well as through its standing committees that address risks inherent in their respective areas of oversight. The audit committee is responsible for reviewing and assessing the quality and effectiveness of our cybersecurity policies, practices and procedures protecting our information technology systems, data, products and services across all business functions, and reporting its findings to the board, which has final oversight responsibility over cybersecurity-related matters.

Our cybersecurity policies, standards, processes and practices are informed by industry-recognized standards. In general, we seek to address cybersecurity risks through a cross-functional approach that is designed to preserve the confidentiality, security and availability of the information that we collect and store.

Cyber Risk Management and Strategy

Under the board’s and audit committee’s oversight, we have implemented and maintain a risk management program that includes processes for the systematic identification, assessment and treatment (through mitigation, transfer, avoidance and/or acceptance) of cybersecurity risks. This risk management program addresses, but is not limited to, risks identified by internal auditors and assessors, threat intelligence providers, internal stakeholders, vulnerability management programs and security management programs. We also engage external independent assessors from time to time to conduct cyber risk assessments and to report both findings and recommendations to management.

Risk assessments: Our security team, in coordination with our enterprise risk management team, conducts periodic risk assessments to identify and analyze the business and security risks, vulnerabilities, emerging technologies, laws and regulations. An internal audit team evaluates the results of these risk assessments to determine critical areas for review as part of our annual internal audit plan. The results of the internal audit plan are reported to the audit committee, and the security team manages and maintains remediation strategies for identified risks.

Vendor risk management: As part of our risk management program, our vendor risk management teams are responsible for conducting due diligence on vendors submitted for risk evaluation where medium- or high-risk data is in scope. We require assessments of these third-party vendors prior to establishing a business relationship, and annually thereafter for high-risk vendors, as part of our efforts to require these vendors to maintain their commitments related to data security, availability and confidentiality. Our security team’s assessment of vendors’ security controls and processes is calibrated to the risk level assigned to the vendor.

Incident response: We employ a formal process to identify, track, prioritize and remediate cybersecurity incidents that may impact the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data stored and processed on our information systems. This process addresses event detection, triage and classification, investigation and escalation, containment and mitigation, recovery and corrective actions. We maintain a written incident response plan that establishes roles, responsibilities and procedures to guide incident response operations.

Policies and procedures: Our security and legal teams actively participate in industry and other advisory groups and monitor regulatory requirements to keep apprised of evolving risks. Policies and procedures, including our Written Information Security Policy, are periodically updated to adapt to evolving business conditions and information technology requirements.

We, like other companies in our industry, face a number of cybersecurity risks in connection with our business. Although risks from cybersecurity threats have to date not materially affected, and we do not believe they are reasonably likely to materially affect, us, our business strategy, results of operations or financial condition, we have, from time to time, experienced threats and security incidents relating to our and our third party vendors’ information systems. For more information, please see “Item 1A, Risk Factors.”

Governance Related to Cybersecurity Risks

Board oversight: Our board has final oversight responsibility over cybersecurity-related matters. The full board participates in interactive sessions with management, typically twice a year, dedicated to cybersecurity risks. These sessions, led by our Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), address a range of cybersecurity-related topics, such as recent developments related to the threat landscape, security controls, vulnerability assessments, third-party reviews, technological trends and information security considerations arising with respect to our peers and third parties.

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The audit committee assists the board in fulfilling its oversight responsibilities with respect to the management of risks arising from cybersecurity threats, and our security team provides written reports to the audit committee for its review. The audit committee is responsible for reporting findings related to its review of these matters to the board.

As appropriate, the board also receives information regarding cybersecurity incidents as well as ongoing updates regarding mitigation of any such incidents until they have been resolved.

Management’s role in assessing and managing cybersecurity risk: Our risk management program for cybersecurity is led by the HubSpot Security & Privacy Committee, which we refer to as the Committee. The Committee oversees our information and technology risk management, compliance, and control functions, and serves as a forum for the discussion of issues involving information security and risk management.

The Committee’s members include senior members of management who are responsible for and collectively have experience in information security, information technology, data protection, risk management and compliance. This collaboration helps us incorporate cyber risk management across all of our significant risk management programs.

The Committee is chaired by the CISO, who works collaboratively across the Company to implement a program designed to protect our information systems from cybersecurity threats and to promptly respond to any cybersecurity incidents in accordance with our incident response and recovery plans. The CISO attends regular meetings with representatives from the legal, ERM and security teams to review newly identified cybersecurity risks and re-review previously identified risks. The Committee then determines how identified risks should be treated. The results of these risk review processes are included in periodic presentations to our executive leadership team and the audit committee.

Our CISO has over seven years of experience running cybersecurity programs and also served as the leader of the cybersecurity team at his previous organization. Effective March 1, 2024, our CISO will be departing the Company, and our Deputy CISO will be promoted to the CISO role at that time. Our Deputy CISO has over 25 years of experience working in security and infrastructure for SaaS and hosted services. She has a master's degree in cybersecurity and has maintained an active CISSP certification since 2012.The CISO reports to the Chief Technology Officer, who has overseen the cybersecurity team since 2020 and has led infrastructure teams at the Company for over 11 years.

 

ITEM 2. Properties

We occupy approximately 223,000 square feet of office space in Cambridge, Massachusetts pursuant to lease agreements that expire through 2035. We also maintain a number of international offices across the world. In January 2023, we announced our Restructuring Plan and began the process of consolidating our office space and reducing the square footage of our facilities. We believe that our existing facilities and offices are adequate to meet our needs for the foreseeable future.

 

ITEM 3. Legal Proceedings

 

From time to time we may become involved in legal proceedings or be subject to claims arising in the ordinary course of our business. Although the results of litigation and claims cannot be predicted with certainty, we currently believe that the ultimate costs to resolve any pending matter will not have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results, financial condition or cash flows. Regardless of the outcome, litigation can have an adverse impact on us because of defense and settlement costs, diversion of management resources and other factors.

 

ITEM 4. Mine Safety Disclosures ITEM 5.

Not Applicable.

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PART II

Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

Market Information for Common Stock

Our common stock has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “HUBS” since October 9, 2014. Prior to that date, there was no public trading market for our common stock. Our initial public offering was priced at $25.00 per share on October 8, 2014.

As of February 9, 2024, we had 23 holders of record of our common stock. The actual number of shareholders is greater than this number of record holders, and includes shareholders who are beneficial owners, but whose shares are held in street name by brokers and other nominees. This number of holders of record also does not include shareholders whose shares may be held in trust by other entities.

Dividends

We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our common stock. We currently anticipate that we will retain future earnings to fund development and growth of our business, and do not anticipate declaring or paying cash dividends in the foreseeable future. Any future determination to pay dividends will be, subject to applicable law, at the discretion of our board of directors and will depend upon, among other factors, our results of operations, financial condition, contractual restrictions, and capital requirements.

Performance Graph

The following performance graph shall not be deemed “soliciting material” or to be “filed” with the Securities and Exchange Commission for purposes of Section 18 of the Exchange Act or otherwise subject to the liabilities under that Section, and shall not be deemed to be incorporated by reference into any filing of the company under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”) or the Exchange Act.

The following graph shows a comparison of the cumulative total return for our common stock, the Nasdaq Computer Index and the S&P 500 Index for each of the last six fiscal years ended December 31, 2023. The graph assumes an initial investment of $100 in each of the Company’s common stock, the Nasdaq Computer Index and the S&P 500. Such returns are based on historical results and are not intended to suggest future performance.

 

 

		12/31/2017				12/31/2018				12/31/2019				12/31/2020				12/31/2021				12/31/2022				12/31/2023
HubSpot		$	100			$	142			$	179			$	448			$	746			$	327			$	657
S&P 500 Index		$	100			$	94			$	121			$	140			$	178			$	144			$	178
Nasdaq Computer Index		$	100			$	96			$	145			$	217			$	299			$	192			$	320

 

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Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities

None.

Purchases of Equity Securities by the Issuer and Affiliated Purchasers

None.

Securities Authorized for Issuance Under Equity Compensation Plans

See Item 12, “Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters,” for information regarding securities authorized for issuance.

 

Outstanding Convertible Senior Notes and Capped Call Options

In June 2020, we issued $460 million aggregate principal amount of convertible senior notes due June 1, 2025 (the “2025 Notes”), of which $459.1 million of the principal amount remained outstanding as of December 31, 2023. In connection with the offering of the 2025 Notes, the Company purchased capped call options (“Capped Call Options”) that give the Company the option to purchase up to approximately 1.6 million shares of its common stock for $282.52 per share. See Note 9 in the Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements for more information.

 

ITEM 6. [Reserved]

Not Applicable.

 

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ITEM 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements and related notes that appear elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. As discussed in the section titled “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements,” the following discussion and analysis contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they never materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those identified below, and those discussed in the section titled “Risk Factors” included under Part I, Item 1A within this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Company Overview

We provide a customer platform that helps businesses connect and grow better. We deliver seamless connection for customer-facing teams with a unified platform that includes three layers: AI-powered engagement hubs, a Smart CRM, and a connected ecosystem that extends the customer platform with app marketplace integrations, a community network, and educational content.

Our engagement hubs include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Operations Hub, CMS Hub and Commerce Hub, as well as other tools and integrations that enable companies to attract, engage, and delight customers throughout the customer experience. Our customer platform features a central database of lead and customer interactions and integrated applications designed to help businesses attract visitors to their websites, convert visitors into leads, close leads into customers, transact with those customers, and delight them so they become promoters of those businesses.

The core of our customer platform is our Smart CRM: a single database of lead and customer information that allows businesses to track their interactions with contacts and customers, manage their customer activities, and report on their pipeline and sales. Our customer platform was built to easily and seamlessly integrate third party applications to further customize to an individual company’s industry or needs. As data is becoming more important to our customers’ success and a differentiator for our business, there is a need to move quickly on data enrichment. The acquisition of Clearbit will allow us to build enriched B2B records directly into our customer platform.

We designed and built our customer platform to serve a broad range of customers globally. Our customer platform starts completely free and grows with our customers to meet their needs at different stages in their life-cycles. It supports multiple languages and currencies and offers an array of sophisticated features, including content partitioning at the enterprise level for companies operating in or serving multiple countries.

We focus on selling to mid-market business-to-business, or B2B, companies, which we define as companies that have between two and 2,000 employees. While our customer platform was built to grow with any company, we focus on selling to mid-market businesses because we believe we have significant competitive advantages attracting and serving this market segment. These mid-market businesses seek an integrated, easy-to-implement and easy-to-use solution to reach customers and compete with organizations that have larger marketing, sales, and customer service budgets. We efficiently reach these businesses at scale through our proven inbound methodology, our Solutions Partners, and our “freemium” model. A Solutions Partner is a service provider that helps businesses with strategy, execution, and implementation of go-to-market activities and technology solutions. Our freemium model attracts customers who begin using our customer platform through our free products and then upgrade to our paid products. As of December 31, 2023, we had 7,663 full-time employees and 205,091 Customers of varying sizes in more than 135 countries, representing many industries.

Our customer platform is a multi-tenant, globally available software-as-a-service product delivered through APIs, web browsers or mobile applications. We sell our customer platform on a subscription basis. Our total revenue increased to $2.2 billion in 2023, from $1.7 billion in 2022, and from $1.3 billion in 2021, representing year-over-year increases of 25% in 2023 and 33% in 2022. We had net losses of $176.3 million in 2023, $112.7 million in 2022, and $77.8 million in 2021.

We derive most of our revenue from subscriptions to our cloud-based customer platform and related professional services, which consist of customer on-boarding, training and consulting services. Subscription revenue accounted for 98% of our total revenue for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, and 97% of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2021. We sell multiple product plans at different base prices on a subscription basis, each of which includes our Smart CRM and integrated applications to meet the needs of the various customers we serve. Customers pay additional fees if the number of contacts stored and tracked in the customer’s database exceeds specified thresholds. We also generate additional revenue based on the purchase of additional subscriptions and products, and the number of account users and subdomains. Most of our Customers’ subscriptions are one year or less in duration.

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Subscriptions are billed in advance on various schedules. Because the mix of billing terms for orders can vary from period to period, the annualized value of the orders we enter into with our customers will not be completely reflected in deferred revenue at any single point in time. Accordingly, we do not believe that change in deferred revenue is an accurate indicator of future revenue.

Many of our customers purchase on-boarding, training, and consulting services, as well as other tools, which are designed to help customers enhance their ability to attract, engage and delight their customers using our customer platform. We also generate revenue from Commerce Hub and a number of revenue-share agreements with other companies based on mutually agreed upon terms. Professional services and other revenue accounted for 2% of total revenue for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, and 3% of total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2021.

We have focused on rapidly growing our business and plan to continue to make investments to help us address some of the challenges facing us to support this growth, such as demand for our customer platform by existing and new customers, significant competition from other providers of marketing, sales, customer service, operations, commerce, and content management software and related applications and rapid technological change in our industry.

We believe that the growth of our business is dependent on many factors, including our ability to expand our customer base, increase adoption of our customer platform within existing customers, develop new products and applications to extend the functionality of our customer platform and provide a high level of customer service. We have invested and intend to continue investing for long-term growth. We intend to continue to invest in sales and marketing to support our growth. We plan to continue to invest in research and development as we continue to introduce new products and applications to extend the functionality of our customer platform. We intend to continue maintaining a high level of customer service and support which we consider critical for our continued success. We also plan to continue investing in our data center infrastructure and services capabilities in order to support continued future customer growth. We also expect to continue to incur additional general and administrative expenses as a result of both our growth and the infrastructure required to be a public company. We expect to use our cash flow from operations and the proceeds from our convertible debt to fund these growth strategies and support our business.

 

Global Economic Conditions

Our results of operations may be significantly influenced by general macroeconomic conditions, including, but not limited to, the impact of pandemics (such as the COVID-19 pandemic), geo-political conflicts, foreign currency fluctuations, interest rates, inflation, recession risks, existing and new domestic and foreign laws and regulations, all of which are beyond our control. Fluctuations in foreign exchange rates and rising inflation have had, and may continue to have an adverse impact on our financial condition and operating results in future periods. As we continue to monitor the direct and indirect impacts of these circumstances, the broader implications of these macroeconomic events on our business, results of operations and overall financial position, particularly in the long term, remain uncertain. See Part I, Item 1A. "Risk Factors" for further discussion of the impact and possible future impacts of pandemics, geo-politcal conflicts, and other general macroeconomic impacts on our business.

 

Key Business Metrics

The following key business metrics are presented in this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in our press releases announcing our financial results which are furnished on Form 8-K. We use these key business metrics to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business and results of operations, formulate financial projections and make strategic decisions. These key business metrics may be calculated in a manner different than similar key business metrics used by other companies.

		Year Ended December 31,
		2023				2022				2021
Customers			205,091				167,386				135,442
Average Subscription Revenue per Customer		$	11,384			$	11,163			$	10,486
Net Revenue Retention			103.9	%			110.3	%			115.2	%

Customers. We believe that our ability to increase our customer base is an indicator of our market penetration, the growth of our business, and our potential future business opportunities as we continue to expand our sales force and invest in marketing efforts. We define our Customers at the end of a particular period as the number of business entities with one or more paid subscriptions to our customer platform either purchased directly with us or purchased from a Solutions Partner. We do not include in Customers any legacy PieSync or Clearbit products. A single customer may have separate paid subscriptions to our customer platform, but we count these as one Customer if certain customer-provided information such as company name, URL, or email address indicate that these subscriptions are managed by the same business entity.

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Average Subscription Revenue per Customer. We believe that our ability to increase the Average Subscription Revenue per Customer is an indicator of our ability to grow the long-term value of our existing customer relationships. We define Average Subscription Revenue per Customer during a particular period as subscription revenue, excluding revenue from our legacy PieSync and Clearbit products, from our Customers during the period divided by the average Customers during the same period.

Net Revenue Retention. We believe that our ability to retain and expand a customer relationship is an indicator of the stability of our revenue base and the long-term value of our Customers. Net Revenue Retention is a measure of the percentage of recurring revenue retained from Customers over a given period of time. Our Net Revenue Retention for a given period is calculated by first dividing Retained Subscription Revenue by Retention Base Revenue in the given period, calculating the weighted average of these rates using the Retention Base Revenue for the period, and then annualizing the resulting rates. A definition of each of the key terms used to calculate Net Revenue Retention is included below.

Retained Subscription Revenue. Contractual Monthly Subscription Revenue of the same cohort of Customers as those that comprise the Retention Base Revenue at the end of the same month.

Retention Base Revenue. Contractual Monthly Subscription Revenue of our Customers as of the beginning of each month.

Contractual Monthly Subscription Revenue. The subscription fees contractually committed to be paid for a full month under our Customer agreements, converted into USD at fixed rates that are held consistent over time, excluding commissions owed to our Solutions Partners.

Key Components of Consolidated Statements of Operations

Revenue

We derive our revenue from two major sources, revenue from subscriptions to our customer platform and professional services and other revenue consisting mainly of on-boarding, training, and consulting services fees.

Subscription based revenue is derived from customers using our customer platform for their inbound marketing, sales, service, operations, and content management needs. Our customer platform includes a system of engagement for efficiently engaging customers through SEO, web content, social, blogging, email, marketing automation, messaging, support ticketing, knowledge base, commerce, conversation routing, video hosting, and data enrichment. Over 1,500 integrations and applications are available for our users, across a wide range of categories, including integrations with leading social media, email, sales, video, analytics, content and webinar tools. All subscription fees that are billed in advance of service are recorded in deferred revenue. Subscription based revenue is recognized net of consideration paid to Solutions Partners when those Solutions Partners purchase a subscription to our customer platform.

Professional services and other revenue are derived primarily from customer on-boarding, training, and consulting services. Depending on which Hubs and services a customer purchases, they receive on-boarding guidance or one-on-one training from one of our on-boarding, inbound consultants, or technical consultants by web meetings. Training is generally sold in connection with a customer’s initial subscription and is billed in advance. The training is also available to be purchased separately following a customer’s purchase of its initial subscription and our Solutions Partners routinely provide the same training to customers. We also derive revenue from Commerce Hub and a number of revenue-share agreements with other companies based on mutually agreed upon terms.

Cost of Revenue, Operating and Other Expenses

Cost of Revenue

Cost of subscription revenue consists primarily of managed hosting providers and other third-party service providers, employee-related costs including payroll, benefits and stock-based compensation expense for our customer support team, amortization of capitalized software development costs and acquired technology, and allocated overhead costs, which we define as facilities, depreciation of fixed assets, and costs related to information technology.

Cost of professional services and other revenue consists primarily of personnel costs of our professional services organization, including salaries, benefits, bonuses and stock-based compensation, amortization of capitalized software development costs associated with our internally built software platform, as well as professional fees and allocated overhead costs, which we define as facilities, depreciation of fixed assets, and costs related to information technology.

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We expect that the cost of subscription and professional services and other revenue will increase in absolute dollars as we continue to invest in growing our business. Over time, we expect to gain benefits of scale associated with our costs of hosting our customer platform relative to subscription revenues, resulting in improved subscription gross margin, exclusive of stock-based compensation. We expect professional services and other margins to breakeven for the foreseeable future, exclusive of stock-based compensation.

Research and Development

Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel costs of our development team, including payroll, benefits and stock-based compensation expense, professional and contractor fees and allocated overhead costs. We capitalize certain software development costs that are attributable to developing new products and adding incremental functionality to our customer platform and amortize such costs as costs of subscription and cost of professional services and other revenue over the estimated life of the new product or incremental functionality, which is generally two years. We also capitalize certain development costs that are attributable to developing our internally developed software platforms and amortize such costs throughout the consolidated statement of operations over the estimated life of our internally developed software platforms, which is generally five years. We focus our research and development efforts on improving our products and developing new ones, delivering new functionality and enhancing the customer experience. We believe delivering new functionality for our customers is an integral part of our solution and provides our customers with access to a broad array of options and information critical to their marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. We expect to continue to make investments in and expand our offerings to enhance our customers’ experience and satisfaction and attract new customers. Over time, we expect research and development expenses to increase in absolute dollars as we continue to increase the functionality of our customer platform and remain consistent as a percentage of total revenue, exclusive of stock-based compensation expense.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel costs of our sales and marketing employees, including sales commissions and incentives, benefits and stock-based compensation expense, marketing programs, including lead generation, costs of our annual INBOUND conference, other brand building expenses, amortization of intangible assets, professional and contractor fees and allocated overhead costs. Sales and marketing expenses also include commissions paid to our Solutions Partners in instances where the end customer purchases and pays for a subscription to our customer platform. We defer certain sales and Solutions Partner commissions related to acquiring new contracts and amortize them ratably over a period of benefit that we have determined to be approximately two to four years.

We plan to continue to invest in sales and marketing to grow our customer base and increase sales to existing customers. This growth will include adding sales personnel and expanding our marketing activities to continue to generate leads and build brand awareness. We expect sales and marketing expenses to increase in absolute dollars as we continue to develop our sales and marketing teams. Over time, we expect sales and marketing expenses will decline as a percentage of total revenue, exclusive of stock-based compensation.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expenses consist of personnel costs and related expenses for executive, finance, legal, human resources, employee-related information technology, administrative personnel, including payroll, benefits and stock-based compensation expense, professional fees for external legal, accounting and other consulting services, and allocated overhead costs. We expect that general and administrative expenses will increase on an absolute dollar basis and remain relatively consistent as a percentage of total revenue, exclusive of stock-based compensation expense, as we focus on processes, systems and controls to enable our internal support functions to scale with the growth of our business. We also anticipate continuing increases to general and administrative expenses as we incur the costs of compliance associated with being a publicly traded company, including audit and consulting fees.

Restructuring

Restructuring expenses primarily consist primarily of lease consolidation charges and personnel costs, such as employee severance payments, benefits, and stock-based compensation expense, associated with our workforce reduction, which are described in Note 17 to our consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K

Other Income (Expense)

Interest income primarily consists of interest earned on invested cash and cash equivalents balances and investments. Interest expense primarily consists of amortization of the debt discount, issuance costs and contractual interest expense related to our Notes, and the loss on early extinguishment of our 2022 Notes. On January 1, 2022, we adopted the new guidance for convertible instruments which eliminates the recognition of the debt discount and losses on early extinguishment.

---

In 2023 and 2022, interest expense consisted of amortization of issuance costs and contract interest expense related to our Notes. Other income (expense) primarily consists of the impact of foreign currency transaction gains and losses associated with monetary assets and liabilities and any gains or impairments on our strategic investments.

Income Tax Expense

Income tax expense consists of current and deferred taxes for U.S. and foreign jurisdictions. We have a history of losses in our most significant jurisdiction, the U.S., and a full valuation allowance against the majority of our deferred tax assets.

Results of Operations

The following tables set forth certain consolidated financial data in dollar amounts and as a percentage of total revenue.

 

		Year Ended December 31,
		2023				2022				2021
		(in thousands)
Revenue:
Subscription		$	2,123,479			$	1,690,538			$	1,258,319
Professional services and other			46,751				40,431				42,339
Total revenue			2,170,230				1,730,969				1,300,658
Cost of revenue:
Subscription			290,802				257,513				211,132
Professional services and other			54,687				56,746				47,725
Total cost of revenue			345,489				314,259				258,857
Gross profit			1,824,741				1,416,710				1,041,801
Operating expenses:
Research and development			617,745				442,022				301,970
Sales and marketing			1,068,560				886,069				649,681
General and administrative			249,649				197,720				144,949
Restructuring			96,843				—				—
Total operating expenses			2,032,797				1,525,811				1,096,600
Loss from operations			(208,056	)			(109,101	)			(54,799	)
Other expense:
Interest income			58,828				15,000				1,173
Interest expense			(3,801	)			(3,762	)			(30,282	)
Other (expense) income			(4,673	)			(6,829	)			10,090
Total other income (expense)			50,354				4,409				(19,019	)
Loss before income tax expense			(157,702	)			(104,692	)			(73,818	)
Income tax expense			(18,593	)			(8,057	)			(4,019	)
Net loss		$	(176,295	)		$	(112,749	)		$	(77,837	)

 

---

 

		Year Ended December 31,
		2023				2022				2021
Revenue:
Subscription			98	%			98	%			97	%
Professional services and other			2				2				3
Total revenue			100				100				100
Cost of revenue:
Subscription			13				15				16
Professional services and other			3				3				4
Total cost of revenue			16				18				20
Gross profit			84				82				80
Operating expenses:
Research and development			28				26				23
Sales and marketing			49				51				50
General and administrative			12				11				11
Restructuring			4				0				0
Total operating expenses			94				88				84
Loss from operations			(10	)			(6	)			(4	)
Total other expense			2				0				(1	)
Loss before income tax expense			(7	)			(6	)			(6	)
Income tax expense			(1	)			(0	)			(0	)
Net loss			-8	%			-7	%			-6	%

 

* Percentages are based on actual values. Totals may not sum due to rounding.

Year Ended December 31, 2023 Compared to the Year Ended December 31, 2022

Revenue

 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Subscription		$	2,123,479			$	1,690,538			$	432,941				26	%
Professional services and other			46,751				40,431				6,320				16	%
Total revenue		$	2,170,230			$	1,730,969			$	439,261				25	%

 

Subscription revenue increased during 2023 due to the increase in Customers, which grew from 167,386 as of December 31, 2022 to 205,091 as of December 31, 2023. Average Subscription Revenue per Customer also increased from $11,163 for the year ended December 31, 2022 to $11,384 for the year ended December 31, 2023. The growth in Customers was primarily driven by increased demand for our lower-priced Starter products. The increase in Average Subscription Revenue per Customer was primarily driven by a continued demand for our Professional and Enterprise products and adoption of multiple Hubs, as well as impact of foreign currency translation primarily attributable to the increase in the value of the Euro and British Pound Sterling relative to the U.S. Dollar, partially offset by continued purchases of our lower-priced Starter products.
 

Professional services and other revenue increased during 2023 primarily due to an increase in overall services revenue from on-boarding and other revenue streams, including Commerce Hub.

 

Cost of Revenue, Gross Profit and Gross Margin Percentage

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Total cost of revenue		$	345,489			$	314,259			$	31,230				10	%
Gross profit			1,824,741				1,416,710				408,031				29	%
Gross margin			84	%			82	%

 

---

Total cost of revenue increased during 2023 primarily due to an increase in subscription and hosting costs, amortization of capitalized software development costs, amortization of acquired technology, offset by a decrease in employee-related costs and allocated overhead expenses. The increase in gross margin was primarily driven by benefits from hosting cost efficiencies from infrastructure optimization efforts.

 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Subscription cost of revenue		$	290,802			$	257,513			$	33,289				13	%
Percentage of subscription revenue			14	%			15	%

 

The increase in subscription cost of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to the year ended December 31, 2022 was primarily due to the following:

 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Subscription and hosting costs		$	24,374
Amortization of capitalized software development costs			11,243
Amortization of acquired technology			920
Employee-related costs			(2,014	)
Allocated overhead expenses			(1,234	)
		$	33,289

 

Subscription and hosting costs increased primarily due to growth in our Customer base from 167,386 at December 31, 2022 to 205,091 at December 31, 2023. We also saw higher subscription and hosting costs as we continued to focus on the security, reliability and performance of our customer platform. Amortization of capitalized software development costs increased due to the increased number of developers working on our software platform as we continued to develop new products and increased functionality. Amortization of acquired technology increased due to certain acquired technology being amortized using a method reflective of the expected economic benefit consumption over the expected useful life of the asset. Employee-related costs decreased as a result of the workforce reduction under the Restructuring Plan. Allocated overhead expenses decreased primarily due to the reduction of our leased space as a result of the global lease consolidation under the Restructuring Plan.

 

 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Professional services and other cost of revenue		$	54,687			$	56,746			$	(2,059	)			-4	%
Percentage of professional services and other revenue			117	%			140	%

 

The decrease in professional services and other cost of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to the year ended December 31, 2022 was primarily due to the following:

 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Allocated overhead and other expenses		$	7,912
Employee-related costs			(9,971	)
		$	(2,059	)

 

Allocated overhead and other expenses increased primarily due to increased costs associated with our other service offerings, offset slightly by a decrease in expense from the reduction of our leased office space under the Restructuring Plan. Employee-related costs decreased as a result of the workforce reduction under the Restructuring Plan.

 

Research and Development

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Research and development		$	617,745			$	442,022			$	175,723				40	%
Percentage of total revenue			28	%			26	%

 

---

The increase in research and development expense for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to the year ended December 31, 2022 was primarily due to the following:

		Change
		(in thousands)
Employee-related costs		$	168,490
Allocated overhead expenses			7,233
		$	175,723

Employee-related costs increased as a result of increased headcount as we continued to grow our engineering organization to develop new products, increase functionality and to maintain our existing customer platform. Allocated overhead expenses increased due to an increase in shared company expenses associated with our systems and infrastructure as we continued to grow our business, offset slightly by a decrease in expense from the reduction of our leased office space under the Restructuring Plan.

Sales and Marketing

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Sales and marketing		$	1,068,560			$	886,069			$	182,491				21	%
Percentage of total revenue			49	%			51	%

The increase in sales and marketing expense for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to the year ended December 31, 2022 was primarily due to the following:

		Change
		(in thousands)
Employee-related costs		$	119,846
Marketing programs			44,169
Solutions Partner commissions			14,596
Amortization of intangible asset			1,727
Allocated overhead expenses			2,153
		$	182,491

Employee-related costs increased as a result of increased headcount as we expanded our selling and marketing organizations to grow our customer base. Marketing programs increased due to the timing and size of certain marketing efforts as we made investments in attracting new customers. Solutions Partner commissions increased as a result of increased revenue generated through our Solutions Partners, partially offset by certain costs that are deferred and amortized over two to four years. Amortization of intangible assets increased primarily due to the purchase of a domain name in the second quarter of 2022. Allocated overhead expenses increased due to an increase in shared company expenses associated with our systems and infrastructure, offset slightly by a decrease in expense from the reduction of our leased office space under the Restructuring Plan.

General and Administrative

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
General and administrative		$	249,649			$	197,720			$	51,929				26	%
Percentage of total revenue			12	%			11	%

---

The increase in general and administrative expense for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to the year ended December 31, 2022 was primarily due to the following:

		Change
		(in thousands)
Employee-related costs		$	36,633
Customer credit card fees			6,197
Professional fees			5,815
Allocated overhead expenses			3,284
		$	51,929

 

Employee-related costs increased as a result of increased headcount as we grew our business and required additional personnel to support our expanded operations. Customer credit card fees increased due to increased customer transactions as we continue to grow our business. Professional fees increased primarily due expenses related to our acquisition of Clearbit in the fourth quarter of 2023 (Note 7). Allocated overhead expenses increased due to an increase in shared company expenses associated with our systems and infrastructure as we continued to grow our business, offset slightly by a decrease in expense from the reduction of our leased office space under the Restructuring Plan.

 

Restructuring

 

		Year Ended December 31,
(dollars in thousands)		2023				2022				$ Change				% Change
Restructuring		$	96,843			$	—			$	96,843			n/a
Percentage of total revenue			4	%			0	%

 

Restructuring charges were $96.8 million in 2023 due to the implementation of the Restructuring Plan in the first quarter of 2023 and its continued execution throughout the year. Restructuring costs primarily consisted of $26.8 million of severance, employee related benefits and other costs, and $70.0 million related to the termination and abandonment of leases globally (Note 17).

Interest Income
 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Interest income		$	58,828			$	15,000			$	43,828				292	%
Percentage of total revenue			3	%			1	%

Interest income primarily consists of interest earned on invested cash and cash equivalents balances and investments. The increase during the year is due to higher balance of cash invested and increases in yields on our investment balances.

Interest Expense
 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Interest expense		$	(3,801	)		$	(3,762	)		$	39				1	%
Percentage of total revenue		*				*

* not meaningful

Interest expense primarily consists of amortization of the debt issuance costs and contractual interest expense related to our 2025 Notes.

Other (Expense) Income
 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Other (expense) income		$	(4,673	)		$	(6,829	)		$	2,156				(32	)%
Percentage of total revenue		*				*

 

---

* not meaningful

The change in other expense during 2023 is primarily due to the following:
 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Gain on strategic investments		$	(4,201	)
Impairment of strategic investments			4,159
Foreign currency transaction gains and losses			2,198
		$	2,156

Other expense primarily consists of the impact of foreign currency transaction gains and losses associated with monetary assets and liabilities and any gains or impairments on our strategic investments. The decrease in gain on strategic investments is due to gains of $4.2 million from observable price changes in the value of certain strategic investments in 2022 that did not reoccur in 2023. The decrease in impairment of strategic investments is due to a $5.9 million loss recorded in 2022 from the decrease in value of our strategic investments compared to $1.7 million in 2023. The change in foreign currency transactions is primarily attributable to the increase in the value of the Euro and British Pound Sterling relative to the U.S. Dollar.

Income Tax expense

 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2023				2022				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Income tax expense		$	(18,593	)		$	(8,057	)		$	(10,536	)			131	%
Effective tax rate			12	%			8	%

 

Income tax expense consists of current and deferred taxes for U.S. and foreign jurisdictions. The increase in income tax expense was primarily driven by increased income in jurisdictions outside of the U.S. that are profitable from a tax perspective and limitations on the utilization of U.S. federal and state net operating loss carry-forwards.

Year Ended December 31, 2022 Compared to the Year Ended December 31, 2021

Revenue

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Subscription		$	1,690,538			$	1,258,319			$	432,219				34	%
Professional services and other			40,431				42,339				(1,908	)			-5	%
Total revenue		$	1,730,969			$	1,300,658			$	430,311				33	%

Subscription revenue increased during 2022 due to the increase in Customers, which grew from 135,442 as of December 31, 2021 to 167,386 as of December 31, 2022. Average Subscription Revenue per Customer increased from $10,486 for the year ended December 31, 2021 to $11,163 for the year ended December 31, 2022. The growth in Customers was primarily driven by our increased demand for our lower-priced Starter products. The increase in Average Subscription Revenue per Customer was primarily driven by a continued demand for our Professional and Enterprise products, partially offset by continued purchases of our lower-priced Starter products and the impact of foreign currency translation primarily attributable to the decline in the value of the Euro and British Pound Sterling relative to the U.S. Dollar.

Professional services and other revenue decreased during 2022 primarily due to non-recurring advertising revenue generated from our acquisition of Hustle Con Media, Inc. (“Hustle”) in the first quarter of 2021, lower overall services revenue from on-boardings and trainings, and lower fees earned from revenue share arrangements with third parties, partially offset by fees earned from other revenue streams.

---

Total Cost of Revenue, Gross Profit and Gross Margin
 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Total cost of revenue		$	314,259			$	258,857			$	55,402				21	%
Gross profit			1,416,710				1,041,801				374,909				36	%
Gross margin			82	%			80	%

Total cost of revenue increased during 2022 primarily due to an increase in subscription and hosting costs, employee-related costs, amortization of capitalized software development costs, amortization of acquired technology, offset by a decrease in allocated overhead expenses. The increase in gross margin was primarily driven by benefits from hosting cost efficiencies from infrastructure optimization efforts.
 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Subscription cost of revenue		$	257,513			$	211,132			$	46,381				22	%
Percentage of subscription revenue			15	%			17	%

The increase in subscription cost of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to the year ended December 31, 2021 was primarily due to the following:
 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Subscription and hosting costs		$	27,451
Employee-related costs			9,850
Amortization of capitalized software development costs			9,068
Amortization of acquired technology			267
Allocated overhead expenses			(255	)
		$	46,381

Subscription and hosting costs increased primarily due to growth in our Customer base from 135,442 at December 31, 2021 to 167,386 at December 31, 2022. We also saw higher subscription and hosting costs as we launched an additional data center in the third quarter of 2021 and continued to focus on the security, reliability and performance of our customer platform. Employee-related costs increased as a result of increased headcount as we grew our customer support organization to support our customer growth and improve service levels and offerings. Amortization of capitalized software development costs increased due to the increased number of developers working on our software platform as we continued to develop new products and increased functionality. Amortization of acquired technology increased due to certain acquired technology being amortized using a method reflective of the expected economic benefit consumption over the expected useful life of the asset. Allocated overhead expenses decreased primarily due to the reduction of our leased office space.

 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Professional services and other cost of revenue		$	56,746			$	47,725			$	9,021				19	%
Percentage of professional services and other revenue			140	%			113	%

The increase in professional services and other cost of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to the year ended December 31, 2021 was primarily due to the following:

 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Employee-related costs		$	8,197
Allocated overhead and other expenses			1,707
Professional fees			(883	)
		$	9,021

 

---

Employee-related costs increased as a result of increased headcount as we grew our professional services organization to support our customer growth. Allocated overhead and other expenses increased primarily due to increased costs associated with our service offerings, offset slightly by a decrease in expense from the reduction of our leased office space. Professional fees decreased due to a reduction in the use of third-party services and contractors.

Research and Development

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Research and development		$	442,022			$	301,970			$	140,052				46	%
Percentage of total revenue			26	%			23	%

 

The increase in research and development expense for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to the year ended December 31, 2021 was primarily due to the following:

 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Employee-related costs		$	140,524
Allocated overhead expenses			4,151
Hosting expenses			(4,623	)
		$	140,052

 

Employee-related costs increased as a result of increased headcount as we continued to grow our engineering organization to develop new products, increase functionality and to maintain our existing customer platform. Allocated overhead expenses increased due to an increase in shared company expenses associated with our systems and infrastructure as we continued to grow our business and expand headcount, offset slightly by a decrease in expense from the reduction of our leased office space. Hosting expense decreased due to incremental spend in the first half of 2021 associated with product development infrastructure that is unrelated to the hosting of our customer platform for paying Customers. In July of 2021, we launched a new data center and the ongoing expenses related to the hosting of our customer platform on that data center are classified as subscription cost of revenue.

Sales and Marketing

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Sales and marketing		$	886,069			$	649,681			$	236,388				36	%
Percentage of total revenue			51	%			50	%

The increase in sales and marketing expense for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to the year ended December 31, 2021 was primarily due to the following:

 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Employee-related costs		$	182,056
Solutions Partner commissions			25,295
Marketing programs			18,032
Allocated overhead expenses			9,967
Amortization of intangible asset			1,038
		$	236,388

 

Employee-related costs increased as a result of increased headcount as we expanded our selling and marketing organizations to grow our customer base. Solutions Partner commissions increased as a result of increased revenue generated through our Solutions Partners. Marketing programs increased due to the timing and size of certain marketing efforts as we continue to make investments in attracting new customers. Allocated overhead expenses increased due to an increase in shared company expenses associated with our systems and infrastructure as we continued to grow our business, offset slightly by a decrease in expense from the reduction of our leased office space.

---

Amortization of intangible assets increased primarily due to the purchase of a domain name in the second quarter of 2022.

General and Administrative

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
General and administrative		$	197,720			$	144,949			$	52,771				36	%
Percentage of total revenue			11	%			11	%

The increase in general and administrative expense for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to the year ended December 31, 2021 was primarily due to the following:
 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Employee-related costs		$	43,111
Customer credit card fees			7,557
Allocated overhead expenses			2,103
		$	52,771

Employee-related costs increased as a result of increased headcount as we grew our business and required additional personnel to support our expanded operations. Customer credit card fees increased due to increased customer transactions as we continue to grow our business. Allocated overhead expenses increased due to an increase in shared company expenses associated with our systems and infrastructure as we continued to grow our business.

Interest Income

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Interest income		$	15,000			$	1,173			$	13,827				1179	%
Percentage of total revenue			1	%		*

* not meaningful

Interest income primarily consists of interest earned on invested cash and cash equivalents balances and investments. The increase during the year is due to an increase in yields on our investment balances.

Interest Expense
 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Interest expense		$	(3,762	)		$	(30,282	)		$	(26,520	)			(88	)%
Percentage of total revenue		*					(2	)%

* not meaningful

The change in interest expense for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to the year ended December 31, 2021 is due to the following:
 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Amortization of the debt discount and issuance costs and   contractual interest expense related to our Notes		$	(21,628	)
Loss on early extinguishment of 2022 Convertible Notes			(4,892	)
		$	(26,520	)

Interest expense primarily consists of amortization of the debt discount and issuance costs and contractual interest expense related to our Notes, and the loss on early extinguishment of our 2022 Notes. Interest expense decreased due to the adoption of the new convertible debt guidance on January 1, 2022, which eliminated the recognition of the debt discount and losses on early extinguishment.

---

Other (Expense) Income
 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Other (expense) income		$	(6,829	)		$	10,090			$	(16,919	)			168	%
Percentage of total revenue		*					1	%

* not meaningful

 

The change in other expense during 2022 is primarily due to the following:
 

		Change
		(in thousands)
Gain on strategic investments		$	(7,540	)
Impairment of strategic investments		$	(5,863	)
Foreign currency transaction gains and losses			(3,516	)
		$	(16,919	)

Other (expense) income primarily consists of the impact of foreign currency transaction gains and losses associated with monetary assets and liabilities and any gains or impairments on our strategic investments. The decrease in gain on strategic investments is due to gains of $11.7 million from observable price changes in 2021 compared to $4.2 million in 2022. The increase in impairment of strategic investments is due to the $5.9 million loss recorded in 2022 from the decrease in value of our strategic investments. The increase in foreign currency transaction losses is primarily attributable to the decline in the value of the Euro and British Pound Sterling relative to the U.S. Dollar.

Income Tax Expense

 

		Year Ended December 31,								Change
		2022				2021				Amount				%
		(dollars in thousands)
Income tax expense		$	(8,057	)		$	(4,019	)		$	(4,038	)			100	%
Effective tax rate			8	%			5	%

Income tax expense consists of current and deferred taxes for U.S. and foreign income taxes. The increase in income tax expense was primarily driven by increased income in jurisdictions outside of the U.S. that are profitable from a tax perspective, the state tax effect of a U.S. federal tax law change in effect from January 1, 2022 that requires the capitalization of research and experimental costs, and lower tax benefits associated with stock-based compensation, partially offset by a non-recurring income tax benefit recognized in 2021 relating to the release of a portion of the Company’s valuation allowance. The release was due to recording net deferred tax liabilities related to the Hustle acquisition, which are a source of income to support the realizability of the Company’s pre-existing U.S. deferred tax assets.

 

Liquidity and Capital Resources

Our principal sources of liquidity to date have been cash and cash equivalents, net accounts receivable, our common stock offerings, and our convertible notes offerings.

The following table shows cash and cash equivalents, working capital, net cash and cash equivalents provided by operating activities, net cash and cash equivalents used in investing activities, and net cash and cash equivalents (used in) and provided by financing activities for the years ended December 31, 2023, 2022 and 2021:

---

		Year Ended December 31,
		2023				2022				2021
		(in thousands)
Cash and cash equivalents		$	387,987			$	331,022			$	377,013
Working capital			915,293				992,946				836,100
Net cash and cash equivalents provided by operating activities			350,971				273,174				238,728
Net cash and cash equivalents used in investing activities			(334,766	)			(319,658	)			(179,508	)
Net cash and cash equivalents provided by (used in) financing activities			37,011				7,428				(51,469	)

Our cash and cash equivalents at December 31, 2023 were held for working capital purposes. We believe our working capital is sufficient to support our operations for at least the next 12 months. At December 31, 2023, $179.8 million of our cash and cash equivalents was held in accounts outside the United States. We do not assert indefinite reinvestment of our foreign earnings because these earnings have been subject to United States Federal tax. While we have concluded that any incremental tax incurred upon ultimate distribution of these earnings to be immaterial, our current plans do not demonstrate a need to repatriate undistributed earnings to fund our U.S. operations.

Net Cash and Cash Equivalents Provided by Operating Activities

Net cash and cash equivalents provided by operating activities consists primarily of net loss adjusted for certain non-cash items, including stock-based compensation, depreciation and amortization and other non-cash charges, net.

Net cash and cash equivalents provided by operating activities during the year ended December 31, 2023 primarily reflected our net loss of $176.3 million and $42.9 million accretion of bond discounts, offset by non-cash expenses that included $72.7 million of depreciation and amortization, restructuring charges of $67.3 million, $432.3 million in stock-based compensation, $1.7 million on impairment of strategic investments, and $2.0 million of amortization of debt issuance costs. Working capital sources of cash and cash equivalents primarily included a $109.9 million increase in deferred revenue primarily resulting from the growth in the number of customers invoiced during the period, a $29.2 million increase in right-of-use asset, and $87.1 million increase in accrued expenses and other liabilities. These sources of cash and cash equivalents were offset by a $47.0 million increase in prepaid expenses and other assets, a $36.9 million decrease in operating lease liabilities, a $14.0 million increase in accounts payable related to timing of bill payments, a $81.2 million increase in deferred commissions, and a $57.6 million increase in accounts receivable as a result of increased billings to customers.

Net cash and cash equivalents provided by operating activities during the year ended December 31, 2022 primarily reflected our net loss of $112.7 million, benefit from deferred income taxes of $2.1 million, $9.1 million accretion of bond discounts, and gains on strategic investments of $4.2 million, offset by non-cash expenses that included $58.2 million of depreciation and amortization, $275.8 million in stock-based compensation, $5.9 million on impairment of strategic investments, and $2.0 million of amortization of debt issuance costs. Working capital sources of cash and cash equivalents primarily included a $117.0 million increase in deferred revenue primarily resulting from the growth in the number of customers invoiced during the period, a $29.5 million increase in right-of-use asset, a $18.3 million increase in accounts payable related to timing of bill payments, and $32.4 million increase in accrued expenses and other liabilities. These sources of cash and cash equivalents were offset by a $6.0 million increase in prepaid expenses and other assets, a $21.1 million decrease in operating lease liabilities, a $37.6 million increase in deferred commissions, and a $74.0 million increase in accounts receivable as a result of increased billings to customers.

Net cash and cash equivalents provided by operating activities during the year ended December 31, 2021 primarily reflected our net loss of $77.8 million, the portion of the repayment of the 2022 Notes attributable to the debt discount of $26.4 million, benefit from deferred income taxes of $2.9 million, gain on termination of operating leases of $4.3 million, and gains on strategic investments of $11.7 million, offset by non-cash expenses that included $45.2 million of depreciation and amortization, $166.8 million in stock-based compensation, $4.3 million amortization of bond discounts, $23.5 million of amortization of debt discount and issuance costs, loss on disposal of fixed assets of $6.5 million, and $4.9 million of loss on early extinguishment of 2022 Notes. Working capital sources of cash and cash equivalents primarily included a $127.7 million increase in deferred revenue primarily resulting from the growth in the number of customers invoiced during the period, a $31.4 million increase in right-of-use asset, and a $58.2 million increase in accrued expenses and other liabilities. These sources of cash and cash equivalents were offset by a $10.6 million increase in accounts payable related to timing of bill payments, a $29.5 million decrease in operating lease liabilities, a $32.6 million increase in deferred commissions, a $1.1 million increase in prepaid and other assets, and a $34.1 million increase in accounts receivable as a result of increased billings to customers consistent with the overall growth of the business.

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Net Cash and Cash Equivalents Used in Investing Activities

Our investing activities have consisted primarily of purchases, maturities and sale of investments, property and equipment purchases, business acquisitions, purchase of intangible assets, purchases of strategic investments, an equity method investment and capitalization of software development costs. Capitalized software development costs are related to new products or improvements to our existing software platform that expands the functionality for our customers.

Net cash and cash equivalents used in investing activities during the year ended December 31, 2023 consisted primarily of $1.6 billion purchases of investments, $33.7 million of purchased property and equipment, $12.4 million of purchases of strategic investments, $2.0 million in an equity method investment, $66.4 million of capitalized software development costs, and $142.1 million in a business acquisition. These uses of cash were offset by $1.5 billion received related to the maturity of investments.

Net cash and cash equivalents used in investing activities during the year ended December 31, 2022 consisted primarily of $1.5 billion purchases of investments, $37.4 million of purchased property and equipment, $26.4 million of purchases of strategic investments, $3.1 million in an equity method investment, $44.3 million of capitalized software development costs, and a $10.0 million purchase of intangible assets. These uses of cash were offset by $1.2 billion received related to the maturity of investments and $125.0 million received for sale of strategic investments.

Net cash and cash equivalents used in investing activities during the year ended December 31, 2021 consisted primarily of $1.5 billion purchases of investments, $28.7 million of purchased property and equipment, a $16.8 million business acquisition, $13.1 million of purchases of strategic investments, $3.1 million in an equity method investment and $33.1 million of capitalized software development costs. These uses of cash were offset by $1.4 billion received related to the maturity of investments and $12.6 million received for sale of strategic investments.

Net Cash and Cash Equivalents Provided by (Used in) Financing Activities

Our financing activities have consisted primarily of the various components of our 2022 Notes repayment, the various components of our 2025 Notes offering and repayment, the issuance of common stock under our stock plans, and payments of employee taxes related to the net share settlement of stock-based awards.

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash provided by financing activities consisted of $47.7 million of proceeds related to issuance of common stock under stock plans, offset by $10.7 million used for payment of employee taxes related to the net share settlement of stock-based awards.

For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash provided by $39.9 million of proceeds related to issuance of common stock under stock plans and $60.5 million of proceeds from settlement of the Convertible Note Hedges, offset by $1.6 million used for the repayment of the 2025 Notes attributable to the principal, $79.8 million payment for settlement of the 2022 Notes, and $11.5 million used for payment of employee taxes related to the net share settlement of stock-based awards.

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash used in financing activities consisted of $89.5 million used for repayment of the 2022 Notes attributable to the principal and $17.4 million used for payment of employee taxes related to the net share settlement of stock-based awards, offset by $9.0 million of proceeds from the settlement of the Convertible Note Hedges related to the 2022 Notes and $46.5 million of proceeds related to issuance of common stock under stock plans.

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Liquidity and Capital Resources Considerations

Contractual Obligations and Commitments

Contractual obligations are cash that we are obligated to pay as part of certain contracts that we have entered during our course of business. Our contractual obligations consist of operating lease liabilities that are included in our consolidated balance sheet and vendor commitments associated with agreements that are legally binding. As of December 31, 2023, the total obligation for operating leases was $405.1 million, of which $54.6 million is expected in the next twelve months. As of December 31, 2023, our vendor commitment was $848.7 million, of which $213.2 million is expected in the next twelve months. See Note 11 of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report.

Convertible Senior Notes

As of December 31, 2023, the carrying value was $456.2 million for our 2025 Notes. The interest rate is fixed at 0.375% for the 2025 Notes. Interest is payable semi-annually in arrears on June 1 and December 1 of each year for both Notes. See Note 9 of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report.

Letters of Credit

As of December 31, 2023, we had a total of $4.1 million in letters of credit outstanding for office space. These irrevocable letters of credit are expected to remain in effect, in some cases, until 2029.

Off Balance Sheet Arrangements

We have no material off-balance sheet arrangements at December 31, 2023 or 2022 exclusive of items described above and indemnifications of officers, directors and employees for certain events or occurrences while the officer, director or employee is, or was, serving at our request in such capacity.

Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates

Our management’s discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations is based on our consolidated financial statements which have been prepared in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America. In preparing our financial statements, we make estimates, assumptions and judgments that can have a significant impact on our reported revenues, results of operations and net income or loss, as well as on the value of certain assets and liabilities on our balance sheet during and as of the reporting periods. These estimates, assumptions and judgments are necessary because future events and their effects on our results and the value of our assets cannot be determined with certainty and are made based on our historical experience and on other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances. These estimates may change as new events occur or additional information is obtained, and we may periodically be faced with uncertainties, the outcomes of which are not within our control and may not be known for a prolonged period of time. Because the use of estimates is inherent in the financial reporting process, actual results could differ from those estimates.

We believe that of our significant accounting policies, which are described in Note 2 “Summary of Significant Accounting Policies” to our consolidated financial statements, the following accounting policies and specific estimates involve a greater degree of judgment and complexity.

Revenue Recognition

We generate revenue from arrangements with multiple performance obligations, which typically include subscriptions to our online software solutions and professional and other services which include on-boarding, training, consulting services and our Commerce Hub. Our customers do not have the right to take possession of the online software products. Revenue from online software products is recognized ratably over the subscription period beginning on the date the online software product is made available to customers. We recognize revenue from on-boarding, training, consulting services, and Commerce Hub as the services are provided. Amounts billed that have not yet met the applicable revenue recognition criteria are recorded as deferred revenue.

We allocate the transaction price to each distinct performance obligation based on the standalone selling price (“SSP”) of each good or service. We calculate SSP for each type of online software product and professional service offering by averaging the selling price of all purchases within the trailing four calendar quarters. We generally use four quarters of transaction data to determine SSP as most of our customer arrangements are one year or less and pricing may be subject to change upon each customer’s renewal. In instances where there are not sufficient data points, or the average selling prices for a particular online software product or professional service offering are disparate, we estimate the SSP using other observable inputs, such as similar products or services. If the actual selling price for the sale of an online software product or professional service offering within a multiple performance obligation arrangement substantially differs from the SSP of that offering, we use the relative SSP to allocate the transaction price to the performance obligations in the contract.

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Costs to Obtain a Contract with a Customer

Sales commissions earned by our sales force and Solutions Partners are considered incremental, recoverable costs of obtaining a contract with a customer. Sales commissions for initial contracts are deferred and then amortized on a straight-line basis over a period of benefit that we have determined to be approximately two to four years. The two to four-year period has been determined by taking into consideration the type of product sold, the commitment term of the customer contract, the nature of the Company’s technology development life-cycle, and an estimated customer relationship period. Sales commissions for upgrade contracts are deferred and amortized on a straight-line basis over the remaining estimated customer relationship period of the related customer. While we do not anticipate any significant changes to the two to four year amortization period, if a change did occur it could produce a material impact on our financial statements. For example, if the commitment term of our customer contracts significantly increased, our deferred commission expense asset would increase, and our amortization expense would decrease in the period in which the change occurs.

Capitalized Software Development Costs

Software development costs consist of certain payroll and stock compensation costs incurred to develop functionality for our customer platform and internally-built software platforms, as well as certain upgrades and enhancements that are expected to result in enhanced functionality. We capitalize certain software development costs for new offerings as well as upgrades to our existing software platforms, while costs associated with planning new developments and maintaining our customer platform and internally built software platforms are expensed as incurred. We amortize these development costs over the estimated useful life of two to five years on a straight-line basis. We determined that a two- to five- year life is appropriate for our internal-use software based on our best estimate of the useful life of the internally developed software after considering factors such as continuous developments in the technology, obsolescence, and anticipated life of the service offering before significant upgrades. Management evaluates the useful lives of these assets on a quarterly basis and tests for impairment whenever events or changes in circumstances occur that could impact the recoverability of these assets.

We determine the amount of internal software costs to be capitalized based on the amount of time spent by our developers on projects in the application stage of development. There is judgment involved in estimating the time allocated to a particular project in the application stage. A significant change in the time spent on each project could have a material impact on the amount capitalized and related amortization expense in subsequent periods.

Leases

We lease office facilities under non-cancelable operating leases that expire at various dates through February 2035. Certain leases contain optional termination dates.

We determine if an arrangement contains a lease at inception and do not separate lease and non-lease components of an arrangement determined to contain a lease. Operating leases with a duration of 12 months or less are excluded from right-of-use-assets and lease liabilities and related expenses are recorded as incurred.

We use our estimated incremental borrowing rate, which is derived from information available at the lease commencement date, in determining the present value of operating lease payments. To determine the estimated incremental borrowing rate, we use publicly available credit ratings for peer companies, and estimate the incremental borrowing rate using yields for maturities that are in line with the duration of the lease payments.

Business Combinations

We account for business acquisitions using the purchase method of accounting, in accordance with which assets acquired and liabilities assumed are recorded at their respective fair values at the acquisition date. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the estimated fair values of the assets acquired and liabilities assumed.

Significant judgment is used in determining fair values of assets acquired and liabilities assumed, as well as intangible assets and their estimated useful lives. Fair value and useful life determinations are based on, among other factors, estimates of future expected cash flows attributable to the acquired intangible assets and appropriate discount rates used in computing present values. Particularly for the acquisition of Clearbit, management applied judgment in estimating the fair value of the acquired developed technology intangible asset, which involved estimates and assumptions with respect to forecasted revenue growth rates, the revenue attributable to the acquired intangible asset over its estimated economic life and the discount rate. These judgments may materially impact the estimates used in allocating the purchase price consideration to the fair value of assets acquired and liabilities assumed, as well as our current and future operating results. Actual results may vary from these estimates that may result in adjustments to goodwill and acquisition date fair values of assets and liabilities during a measurement period or upon a final determination of asset and liability fair values, whichever occurs first.

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Adjustments to the fair value of assets acquired and liabilities assumed made after the end of the measurement period are recorded within our operating results.

Recent Accounting Pronouncements

For information on recent accounting pronouncements, see Recent Accounting Pronouncements in the notes to the consolidated financial statements appearing elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

ITEM 7A. Qualitative and Quantitative Disclosures About Market Risk

Foreign Currency Exchange Risk

We have foreign currency risks related to our revenue, cost of revenue, and operating expenses denominated in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, primarily the Euro, British Pound Sterling, Australian dollar, Singaporean dollar, Japanese Yen, Colombian Peso and Canadian dollar. Since we translate foreign currencies into U.S. dollars for financial reporting purposes, currency fluctuations can have an impact on our financial results.

We have experienced and will continue to experience fluctuations in our net loss as a result of transaction gains or losses related to revaluing certain current asset and current liability balances that are denominated in currencies other than the functional currency of the entities in which they are recorded. Our Board recently approved a hedging program intended to allow us to mitigate foreign exchange impacts, such as exposure to currency exchange rates in connection with significant transactions denominated in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, by entering into derivatives transactions such as foreign exchange forwards. We expect to begin our hedging program in 2024.

Interest Rate Sensitivity

Our portfolio of cash and cash equivalents and short- and long-term investments is maintained in a variety of securities, including government agency obligations, corporate bonds and money market funds. Investments are classified as available-for-sale securities and carried at their fair market value with cumulative unrealized gains or losses recorded as a component of accumulated other comprehensive loss within stockholders' equity. A sharp rise in interest rates could have an adverse impact on the fair market value of certain securities in our portfolio. We do not currently hedge our interest rate exposure and do not enter into financial instruments for trading or speculative purposes.

Market Risk and Market Interest Risk

In June 2020, we issued $460.0 million aggregate principal amount of convertible senior notes due June 1, 2025, of which $459.1 million remained outstanding as of December 31, 2023. The fair value of the 2025 Notes is subject to interest rate risk, market risk and other factors due to the convertible feature. The fair value of the 2025 Notes will generally increase as our common stock price increases and will generally decrease as our common stock price declines in value. The interest and market value changes affect the fair value of the 2025 Notes but do not impact our financial position, cash flows or results of operations due to the fixed nature of the debt obligation. Generally, the fair values of the 2025 Notes will increase as interest rates fall and decrease as interest rates rise. Additionally, we carry the 2025 Notes at face value less unamortized discount on our balance sheet, and we present the fair value for required disclosure purposes only. The Federal Reserve has raised, and may continue to raise interest rates in an effort to combat high inflation. There continues to be uncertainty in the changing market and economic conditions, including the possibility or additional measures that could be taken by the Federal Reserve and other government agencies, related to concerns over inflation risk.

The table below provides a sensitivity analysis of hypothetical 10% changes of our stock price as of December 31, 2023 and the estimated impact on the fair value of the 2025 Notes. The selected scenarios are not predictions of future events, but rather are intended to illustrate the effect such event may have on the fair value of the Notes.

 

2025 Notes

Hypothetical change in HubSpot stock price		Fair value				Estimated change in fair value				Hypothetical percentage increase (decrease) in fair value
10% increase		$	853,193			$	(101,222	)			-11	%
No change		$	954,414			$	—				—
10% decrease		$	1,037,604			$	83,189				9	%

 

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ITEM 8. FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

 

 

INDEX TO CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

		Page
Reports of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm (PCAOB ID No. 238)
Consolidated Balance Sheets		69
Consolidated Statements of Operations		70
Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Loss		71
Consolidated Statement of Stockholders’ Equity		72
Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows		73
Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements		74

 

 

Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm

 

To the Board of Directors and Stockholders of HubSpot, Inc.

 

Opinions on the Financial Statements and Internal Control over Financial Reporting

 

We have audited the accompanying consolidated balance sheets of HubSpot, Inc. and its subsidiaries (the “Company”) as of December 31, 2023 and 2022, and the related consolidated statements of operations, of comprehensive loss, of stockholders’ equity and of cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2023, including the related notes (collectively referred to as the “consolidated financial statements”). We also have audited the Company's internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2023, based on criteria established in Internal Control - Integrated Framework (2013) issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO).

 

In our opinion, the consolidated financial statements referred to above present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company as of December 31, 2023 and 2022, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended December 31, 2023 in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America. Also in our opinion, the Company maintained, in all material respects, effective internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2023, based on criteria established in Internal Control - Integrated Framework (2013) issued by the COSO.

 

Basis for Opinions

 

The Company's management is responsible for these consolidated financial statements, for maintaining effective internal control over financial reporting, and for its assessment of the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting, included in Management’s Report on Internal Control Over Financial Reporting appearing under Item 9A. Our responsibility is to express opinions on the Company’s consolidated financial statements and on the Company's internal control over financial reporting based on our audits. We are a public accounting firm registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States) (PCAOB) and are required to be independent with respect to the Company in accordance with the U.S. federal securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB.

 

We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audits to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the consolidated financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud, and whether effective internal control over financial reporting was maintained in all material respects.

 

Our audits of the consolidated financial statements included performing procedures to assess the risks of material misstatement of the consolidated financial statements, whether due to error or fraud, and performing procedures that respond to those risks. Such procedures included examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the consolidated financial statements. Our audits also included evaluating the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall presentation of the consolidated financial statements. Our audit of internal control over financial reporting included obtaining an understanding of internal control over financial reporting, assessing the risk that a material weakness exists, and testing and evaluating the design and operating effectiveness of internal control based on the assessed risk. Our audits also included performing such other procedures as we considered necessary in the circumstances. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinions.

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As described in Management’s Report on Internal Control Over Financial Reporting, management has excluded Clearbit from its assessment of internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2023 because it was acquired by the Company in a purchase business combination during 2023. We have also excluded Clearbit from our audit of internal control over financial reporting. Clearbit is a wholly-owned subsidiary whose total assets and total revenues excluded from management’s assessment and our audit of internal control over financial reporting represent less than 1% of the related consolidated financial statement amounts as of and for the year ended December 31, 2023.

 

Definition and Limitations of Internal Control over Financial Reporting

 

A company’s internal control over financial reporting is a process designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements for external purposes in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A company’s internal control over financial reporting includes those policies and procedures that (i) pertain to the maintenance of records that, in reasonable detail, accurately and fairly reflect the transactions and dispositions of the assets of the company; (ii) provide reasonable assurance that transactions are recorded as necessary to permit preparation of financial statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, and that receipts and expenditures of the company are being made only in accordance with authorizations of management and directors of the company; and (iii) provide reasonable assurance regarding prevention or timely detection of unauthorized acquisition, use, or disposition of the company’s assets that could have a material effect on the financial statements.

 

Because of its inherent limitations, internal control over financial reporting may not prevent or detect misstatements. Also, projections of any evaluation of effectiveness to future periods are subject to the risk that controls may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or that the degree of compliance with the policies or procedures may deteriorate.

 

Critical Audit Matters

 

The critical audit matter communicated below is a matter arising from the current period audit of the consolidated financial statements that was communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that (i) relates to accounts or disclosures that are material to the consolidated financial statements and (ii) involved our especially challenging, subjective, or complex judgments. The communication of critical audit matters does not alter in any way our opinion on the consolidated financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matter below, providing a separate opinion on the critical audit matter or on the accounts or disclosures to which it relates.

 

Capitalized software development costs - estimate of time and related costs eligible for capitalization

 

As described in Note 2 to the consolidated financial statements, the Company’s consolidated capitalized software development costs, net balance was $106.2 million as of December 31, 2023. The Company capitalizes certain software development costs for new offerings as well as upgrades to existing software platforms. Management determines the amount of internal software costs to be capitalized based on the amount of time spent by developers on projects in the application stage of development. There is judgment involved in estimating time allocated to a particular project in the application stage.

 

The principal considerations for our determination that performing procedures relating to the estimate of time and related costs eligible for capitalization as capitalized software development costs is a critical audit matter are (i) the significant judgment by management when determining the amount of time to capitalize for projects, and (ii) a high degree of auditor judgment, subjectivity, and effort in performing procedures and evaluating audit evidence related to management’s determination of capitalized costs and management’s judgment related to the amount of time incurred by developers on projects in the application stage.

 

Addressing the matter involved performing procedures and evaluating audit evidence in connection with forming our overall opinion on the consolidated financial statements. These procedures included testing the effectiveness of controls relating to capitalized software development costs, including controls over management’s estimate of time and related costs eligible for capitalization. These procedures also included, among others (i) testing management’s process for determining the time and related costs eligible for capitalization in the current year, (ii) evaluating whether the time and related costs were eligible for capitalization, (iii) testing the completeness and accuracy of underlying data used in management’s estimate of eligible time and related costs, and (iv) evaluating the reasonableness of significant assumptions used by management in estimating eligible time and related costs. Evaluating management’s assumptions related to eligible software development time for capitalization involved evaluating whether the assumptions used by management were reasonable considering (i) inquiries with management and IT product development managers in evaluating the software development costs capitalized for a sample of capitalized projects, and (ii) evaluating management’s estimate of hours through inquiry with a sample of individual software developers regarding the nature, timing and extent of time worked on development activities.

 

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/s/ PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

Boston, Massachusetts

February 14, 2024

 

We have served as the Company’s auditor since 2016.

 

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HUBSPOT, INC.

CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS

(In thousands, except per share amounts)

		December 31, 2023				December 31, 2022
Assets
Current assets:
Cash and cash equivalents		$	387,987			$	331,022
Short-term investments			1,000,245				1,081,662
Accounts receivable—net of allowance for credit losses of $5,516 and $3,266 at December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively			295,303				226,849
Deferred commission expense			99,326				70,992
Prepaid expenses and other current assets			88,679				44,074
Total current assets			1,871,540				1,754,599
Long-term investments			325,703				112,791
Property and equipment, net			103,331				105,227
Capitalized software development costs, net			106,229				63,790
Right-of-use assets			251,071				319,304
Deferred commission expense, net of current portion			122,194				66,559
Other assets			75,247				58,795
Intangible assets, net			42,316				17,446
Goodwill			173,761				46,227
Total assets			3,071,392				2,544,738
Liabilities and stockholders’ equity
Current liabilities:
Accounts payable			9,106				20,883
Accrued compensation costs			53,462				10,224
Accrued commissions			78,169				52,622
Accrued expenses and other current liabilities			108,313				102,122
Operating lease liabilities			35,047				35,928
Deferred revenue			672,150				539,874
Total current liabilities			956,247				761,653
Operating lease liabilities, net of current portion			296,561				316,184
Deferred revenue, net of current portion			5,810				5,904
Other long-term liabilities			36,459				14,546
Convertible senior notes			456,206				454,227
Total liabilities			1,751,283				1,552,514
Commitments and contingencies (Note 11)
Stockholders’ equity:
Common stock, $0.001 par value—500,000 shares authorized; 51,358 and 50,127 shares issued; 50,448 and 49,217 shares outstanding at December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively			50				49
Additional paid-in capital			2,136,908				1,647,446
Accumulated other comprehensive income (loss)			1,827				(12,890	)
Accumulated deficit			(818,676	)			(642,381	)
Total stockholders’ equity			1,320,109				992,224
Total liabilities and stockholders’ equity		$	3,071,392			$	2,544,738

The accompanying notes are an integral part of the consolidated financial statements.

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HUBSPOT, INC.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS

(In thousands, except per share amounts)

		Year Ended December 31,
		2023				2022				2021
Revenue:
Subscription		$	2,123,479			$	1,690,538			$	1,258,319
Professional services and other			46,751				40,431				42,339
Total revenue			2,170,230				1,730,969				1,300,658
Cost of Revenue:
Subscription			290,802				257,513				211,132
Professional services and other			54,687				56,746				47,725
Total cost of revenue			345,489				314,259				258,857
Gross profit			1,824,741				1,416,710				1,041,801
Operating expenses:
Research and development			617,745				442,022				301,970
Sales and marketing			1,068,560				886,069				649,681
General and administrative			249,649				197,720				144,949
Restructuring (Note 17)			96,843				—				—
Total operating expenses			2,032,797				1,525,811				1,096,600
Loss from operations			(208,056	)			(109,101	)			(54,799	)
Other expense:
Interest income			58,828				15,000				1,173
Interest expense			(3,801	)			(3,762	)			(30,282	)
Other (expense) income			(4,673	)			(6,829	)			10,090
Total other income (expense)			50,354				4,409				(19,019	)
Loss before income tax expense			(157,702	)			(104,692	)			(73,818	)
Income tax expense			(18,593	)			(8,057	)			(4,019	)
Net loss			(176,295	)			(112,749	)			(77,837	)
Net loss per common share, basic and diluted		$	(3.53	)		$	(2.35	)		$	(1.66	)
Weighted average common shares used in computing basic and diluted net    loss per common share:			49,877				48,065				46,891

The accompanying notes are an integral part of the consolidated financial statements.

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HUBSPOT, INC.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE LOSS

(In thousands)

		Year ended December 31,
		2023				2022				2021
Net loss		$	(176,295	)		$	(112,749	)		$	(77,837	)
Other comprehensive loss:
Foreign currency translation adjustments			4,020				(2,538	)			(4,712	)
Changes in unrealized gain (loss) on investments, net of income taxes of $0 in 2023, $0 in 2022, and ($44) in 2021			10,697				(9,013	)			(1,230	)
Comprehensive loss		$	(161,578	)		$	(124,300	)		$	(83,779	)

The accompanying notes are an integral part of the consolidated financial statements.

 

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HUBSPOT, INC.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF STOCKHOLDERS’ EQUITY

(In thousands, except per share amounts)

 

	Common Stock, $0.001 Par Value								Treasury Stock, $0.001 Par Value								Additional Paid-In				Accumulated Other Comprehensive				Accumulated
	Shares				$				Shares				$				Capital				Income (Loss)				Deficit				Total
Balances at January 1, 2021		46,115			$	46				12			$	—			$	1,241,167			$	4,603			$	(483,161	)			762,655
Issuance of common stock under   stock plans, net of shares withheld for   employee taxes		1,275				1				—				—				27,488				—				—				27,489
Equity component of the 2022   Notes conversions		898				1				—				—				(11,278	)			—				—				(11,277	)
Settlement of Convertible Note Hedges		(898	)			(1	)			898				—				8,985				—				—				8,984
Stock-based compensation		—				—				—				—				169,727				—				—				169,727
Cumulative translation adjustment		—				—				—				—				—				(4,712	)			—				(4,712	)
Unrealized loss on investments, net of   income taxes of ($44)		—				—				—				—				—				(1,230	)			—				(1,230	)
Net loss		—				—				—				—				—				—				(77,837	)			(77,837	)
Balances at December 31, 2021		47,390			$	47				910			$	—			$	1,436,089			$	(1,339	)		$	(560,998	)		$	873,799
Issuance of common stock under   stock plans		1,052				1				—				—				39,931				—				—				39,932
Restricted stock units taxes paid in cash		(27	)			—				—				—				(11,526	)			—				—				(11,526	)
Stock-based compensation		—				—				—				—				284,749				—				—				284,749
Conversion of the 2025 Notes		—				—				—				—				(691	)			—				—				(691	)
Conversion of the 2022 Notes		—				—				—				—				(60,422	)			—				—				(60,422	)
Settlement of Convertible Note Hedges		—				—				—				—				60,483				—				—				60,483
Cumulative adjustment from adoption   of convertible debt standard		—				—				—				—				(101,167	)			—				31,366				(69,801	)
Settlement of Warrants		802				1				—				—				—				—				—				1
Cumulative translation adjustment		—				—				—				—				—				(2,538	)			—				(2,538	)
Unrealized loss on investments, net of   income taxes of $0		—				—				—				—				—				(9,013	)			—				(9,013	)
Net loss		—				—				—				—				—				—				(112,749	)			(112,749	)
Balances at December 31, 2022		49,217			$	49				910			$	—			$	1,647,446			$	(12,890	)		$	(642,381	)		$	992,224
Issuance of common stock under   stock plans		1,255				1				—				—				46,120				—				—				46,121
Restricted stock units taxes paid in cash		(24	)			—				—				—				(10,756	)			—				—				(10,756	)
Stock-based compensation		—				—				—				—				454,098				—				—				454,098
Cumulative translation adjustment		—				—				—				—				—				4,020				—				4,020
Unrealized gain on investments, net of   income taxes of $0		—				—				—				—				—				10,697				—				10,697
Net loss		—				—				—				—				—				—				(176,295	)			(176,295	)
Balances at December 31, 2023		50,448			$	50				910			$	—			$	2,136,908			$	1,827			$	(818,676	)			1,320,109

The accompanying notes are an integral part of the consolidated financial statements.

 

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HUBSPOT, INC.

CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS

(In thousands)

		Year Ended December 31,
		2023				2022				2021
Operating Activities:
Net loss		$	(176,295	)		$	(112,749	)		$	(77,837	)
Adjustments to reconcile net loss to net cash and cash equivalents provided by    operating activities, net of acquisitions
Depreciation and amortization			72,673				58,150				45,159
Stock-based compensation			432,271				275,849				166,761
Restructuring charges			67,263				—				—
Loss on early extinguishment of 2022 Convertible Notes			—				—				4,892
Repayment of 2022 Convertible Notes attributable to the debt discount			—				—				(26,428	)
Gain on termination of operating leases			—				—				(4,276	)
Loss on disposal of fixed assets			—				—				6,468
Gain on strategic investments			—				(4,201	)			(11,741	)
Impairment of strategic investments			1,704				5,863				—
Provision for (benefit from) deferred income taxes			5,208				(2,122	)			(2,869	)
Amortization of debt discount and issuance costs			1,986				2,013				23,507
(Accretion) amortization of bond discount			(42,907	)			(9,118	)			4,275
Unrealized currency translation			(341	)			1,010				1,304
Changes in assets and liabilities, net of acquisition
Accounts receivable			(57,618	)			(73,985	)			(34,107	)
Prepaid expenses and other assets			(47,048	)			(5,987	)			(1,077	)
Deferred commission expense			(81,178	)			(37,583	)			(32,560	)
Right-of-use assets			29,173				29,531				31,418
Accounts payable			(14,031	)			18,277				(10,608	)
Accrued expenses and other current liabilities			87,074				32,375				58,209
Operating lease liabilities			(36,889	)			(21,118	)			(29,478	)
Deferred revenue			109,926				116,969				127,716
Net cash and cash equivalents provided by operating activities			350,971				273,174				238,728
Investing Activities:
Purchases of investments			(1,580,504	)			(1,507,870	)			(1,484,762	)
Maturities of investments			1,502,534				1,184,506				1,387,498
Sale of investments			—				124,998				—
Purchases of property and equipment			(33,718	)			(37,426	)			(28,726	)
Capitalization of software development costs			(66,372	)			(44,345	)			(33,139	)
Purchases of intangible assets			(164	)			(10,000	)			—
Acquisition of a business, net of cash acquired			(142,129	)			—				(16,810	)
Proceeds from sale of strategic investments			—				—				12,620
Payments for equity method investments			(2,025	)			(3,150	)			(3,100	)
Purchase of strategic investments			(12,388	)			(26,371	)			(13,089	)
Net cash and cash equivalents used in investing activities			(334,766	)			(319,658	)			(179,508	)
Financing Activities:
Proceeds from settlement of Convertible Note Hedges related to the 2022 Convertible Notes			—				60,483				8,985
Payments for settlement of Warrants related to the 2022 Convertible Notes			—				(34	)			—
Payment for settlement of 2022 Convertible Notes			—				(79,807	)			(89,525	)
Repayment of 2025 Convertible Notes attributable to the principal			(13	)			(1,619	)			—
Employee taxes paid related to the net share settlement of stock-based awards			(10,714	)			(11,526	)			(17,439	)
Proceeds related to the issuance of common stock under stock plans			47,738				39,931				46,510
Net cash and cash equivalents provided by (used in) financing activities			37,011				7,428				(51,469	)
Effect on exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents			4,649				(6,811	)			(8,861	)
Net (decrease) increase in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash			57,865				(45,867	)			(1,110	)
Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash, beginning of year			334,175				380,042				381,152
Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash, end of year			392,040			$	334,175			$	380,042
Supplemental cash flow disclosure:
Cash paid for interest		$	1,722			$	1,746			$	1,843
Cash paid for income taxes		$	12,911			$	4,685			$	6,970
Right-of-use assets obtained in exchange for operating lease facilities		$	7,059			$	74,985			$	92,131
Right-of-use asset reductions related to operating lease terminations		$	(7,382	)		$	-			$	(46,587	)
Non-cash investing and financing activities:
Capital expenditures incurred but not yet paid		$	1,068			$	247			$	470
Asset retirement obligations		$	(199	)		$	1,113			$	71
Issuance of common stock for repayment of 2022 Convertible Notes		$	—			$	—			$	493,172

 

The accompanying notes are an integral part of the consolidated financial statements NOTES TO CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

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HUBSPOT, INC.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Company's proportionate share of the Fund's net loss was recorded as other expense, net of tax, in the consolidated statements of operations. As of December 31, 2023, the carrying amount of the Company’s investment in the Fund was $7.9 million.

 

 

 

 

 

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ITEM 9. Changes in and Disagreements with Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure

None.

 

 

ITEM 9A. Controls and Procedures

 

Our management, with the participation of our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, has evaluated the effectiveness of our disclosure controls and procedures (as defined in Rules 13a-15(e) and 15d-15(e) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the Exchange Act)), as of the end of the period covered by this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Based on such evaluation, our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer have concluded that as of December 31, 2023, our disclosure controls and procedures were effective at the reasonable assurance level.

 

Our management, with the participation of our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, is responsible for establishing and maintaining adequate internal control over financial reporting. Internal control over financial reporting is defined in Rules 13a-15(f) or 15d-15(f) promulgated under the Exchange Act as a process designed by, or under the supervision of, the company's principal executive and principal financial officers and effected by the company’s board of directors, management and other personnel, to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements for external purposes in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles and includes those policies and procedures that:

 

 

 

 

 

Because of its inherent limitations, internal control over financial reporting may not prevent or detect misstatements. Also, projections of any evaluation of effectiveness to future periods are subject to the risk that controls may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or that the degree of compliance with the policies or procedures may deteriorate.

 

Management has excluded Clearbit, which the Company acquired in December 2023, from its assessment of internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2023. Clearbit is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company whose total assets and total revenues excluded from management's assessment represented less than 1% each of the related consolidated financial statement amounts for the Company as of and for the year ended December 31, 2023.

 

Our management assessed the effectiveness of the Company’s internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2023. In making this assessment, our management used the criteria set forth by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (“COSO”) in Internal Control — Integrated Framework (2013).

 

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Based on our assessment, management, with the participation of our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, concluded that, as of December 31, 2023, our internal control over financial reporting was effective based on those criteria.

 

The effectiveness of the Company’s internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2023 has been audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, an independent registered public accounting firm, as stated in its report, which is included under Item 8 of this annual report on Form 10-K.

(c) Inherent Limitations of Internal Controls

Our management, including our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, does not expect that our disclosure controls and procedures or our internal control over financial reporting will prevent all errors and all fraud. A control system, no matter how well conceived and operated, can provide only reasonable, not absolute, assurance that the objectives of the control system are met. Because of the inherent limitations in all control systems, no evaluation of controls can provide absolute assurance that all control issues and instances of fraud, if any, within the Company have been detected. These inherent limitations include the realities that judgments in decision-making can be faulty, and that breakdowns can occur because of a simple error or mistake. Additionally, controls can be circumvented by the individual acts of some persons, by collusion of two or more people, or by management override of the control. The design of any system of controls also is based in part upon certain assumptions about the likelihood of future events, and there can be no assurance that any design will succeed in achieving its stated goals under all potential future conditions. Over time, controls may become inadequate because of changes in conditions, or the degree of compliance with the policies or procedures may deteriorate. Because of the inherent limitations, misstatements due to error or fraud may occur and not be detected.

(d) Changes in Internal Control over Financial Reporting

No change in our internal control over financial reporting occurred during the quarter ended December 31, 2023 that has materially affected, or is reasonably likely to materially affect, our internal control over financial reporting.

 

 

ITEM 9B. Other Information

 

 

ITEM 9C. Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections.

Not applicable.

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PART III

 

 

ITEM 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance

The complete response to this Item regarding the backgrounds of our executive officers and directors and other information required by Items 401, 405 and 407 of Regulation S-K will be contained in our definitive proxy statement for our 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

Code of Business Conduct and Ethics

We have adopted a code of business conduct and ethics that is applicable to all of our employees, officers and directors including our chief executive officer and senior financial officers, which is available on our website under “Investor Relations—Leadership & Governance.”

 

 

ITEM 11. Executive Compensation

The information required by this Item is incorporated by reference herein to our definitive proxy statement for our 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

 

 

ITEM 12. Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters

The information required by this Item is incorporated by reference herein to our definitive proxy statement for our 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

 

 

ITEM 13. Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence

The information required by this Item is incorporated by reference herein to our definitive proxy statement for our 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

 

 

ITEM 14. Principal Accountant Fees and Services ITEM 15.

The information required by this Item is incorporated by reference herein to our definitive proxy statement for our 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

 

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PART IV

 

 

Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules

(a) Documents Filed as Part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K

1. Financial Statements (included in Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K):

2. Financial Statement Schedules

Financial statements schedules are omitted as they are either not required or the information is otherwise included in the consolidated financial statements.

3. The exhibits required by Item 601 of Regulation S-K are listed in the Exhibit List on the following page and are incorporated herein.

 

ITEM 16. 10-K Summary

 

Not applicable.

 

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EXHIBIT LIST

Exhibit
number		Description of exhibit
3.1(1)		Seventh Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation (as amended and currently in effect)
3.2(2)		Fourth Amended and Restated Bylaws
4.1(3)		Form of Common Stock Certificate
4.2(4)		Indenture, dated as of June 4, 2020, between the Registrant, and Wilmington Trust, National Association, as trustee
4.3(4)		Form of 0.375% Convertible Senior Notes due 2025 (included in Exhibit 4.2)
4.4(5)		Description of the Registrant's Securities Registered Pursuant to Section 12 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended
10.1(6)		Lease dated April 23, 2015 between Two Canal Park Massachusetts LLC (formerly BCSP Cambridge Two Property LLC) and HubSpot, Inc.; First Amendment to Lease dated August 10, 2016; Second Amendment to Lease dated March 12, 2018; Third Amendment to Lease dated December 2, 2019; Fourth Amendment to Lease dated January 6, 2020; Fifth Amendment dated July 2, 2021
10.2(7)		Lease of 1 – 6 Sir John Rogerson's Quay, Windmill Quarter, Dublin 2, dated August 1, 2019, between Hibernia REIT Public Limited Company, as Landlord, HubSpot Ireland Limited, as Tenant, SOBO Management Company Limited by Guarantee, as Management Company, and HubSpot, Inc., as Guarantor
10.3(8)#		Form of Indemnification Agreement between the Registrant and each of its Executive Officers and Directors
10.4(9)#		2007 Equity Incentive Plan and forms of restricted stock agreement and option agreements thereunder
10.5**#		2014 Stock Option and Grant Plan, Amendment No. 1 thereto, and forms of restricted stock and option agreements thereunder
10.6(10)#		Amended and Restated 2014 Employee Stock Purchase Plan
10.7(11)#		Management Cash Incentive Bonus Plan
10.8(12)		Form of Call Option Transaction Confirmation
10.9(13)		Form of Warrant Confirmation
10.10(14)#		Non-Employee Director Compensation Policy (as amended and currently in effect)
10.11(15)		Form of Capped Call Transaction Confirmation
21.1**		List of Subsidiaries
23.1**		Consent of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm
24.1**		Power of Attorney (included on signature page)
31.1**		Certification of Chief Executive Officer Pursuant to Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002
31.2**		Certification of Chief Financial Officer Pursuant to Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002
32.1**Ÿ		Certification of Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer Pursuant to Section 906 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002
97.1**		Policy of Recoupment of Incentive Compensation

 

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101.INS**		Inline XBRL Instance Document – the instance document does not appear in the Interactive Data File because XBRL tags are embedded within the Inline XBRL document
101.SCH**		Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Schema Document
101.CAL**		Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Calculation Linkbase Document
101.DEF**		Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Definition Linkbase Document
101.LAB**		Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Label Linkbase Document
101.PRE**		Inline XBRL Taxonomy Extension Presentation Linkbase Document
104		Cover Page Interactive Data File (formatted as Inline XBRL with applicable taxonomy extension information contained in Exhibits 101.*)

# Indicates a management contract or compensatory plan.

** Filed herewith.

Ÿ The certifications furnished in Exhibit 32.1 hereto are deemed to accompany this Annual Report on Form 10-K and will not be deemed “filed” for purposes of Section 18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Such certifications will not be deemed to be incorporated by reference into any filings under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, except to the extent that the Registrant specifically incorporates any of them by reference.

(1) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 3.1 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on February 24, 2016.

(2) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 3.1 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the SEC on January 27, 2023.

(3) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 4.1 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Amendment No. 1 to Registration Statement on Form S-1 (SEC File No. 333-198333) filed on September 26, 2014.

(4) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 4.1 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Current Report on Form 8-K filed on June 5, 2020.

(5) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 4.5 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on February 12, 2020.

(6) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.4 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on February 16, 2023.

(7) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.5 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on February 12, 2020.

(8) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.4 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Registration Statement on Form S-1 (SEC File No. 333-198333) filed on August 25, 2014.

(9) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.5 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Registration Statement on Form S-1 (SEC File No. 333-198333) filed on August 25, 2014.

(10) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.4 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on February 16, 2023.

(11) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.10 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on February 14, 2022.

(12) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.1 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Form 8-K filed on May 10, 2017.

(13) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.2 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Form 8-K filed on May 10, 2017.

(14) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.13 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on February 14, 2022.

(15) Incorporated by reference to Exhibit 10.1 to HubSpot, Inc.’s Current Report on Form 8-K filed on June 5, 2020.

 

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Signatures

Pursuant to the requirements of Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned, thereunto duly authorized, in the city of Cambridge, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on the 14th day of February 2024.

 

HUBSPOT, INC.
By:		/s/ Yamini Rangan
		Yamini Rangan
		Chief Executive Officer

 

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POWER OF ATTORNEY

We, the undersigned directors and officers of HubSpot, Inc. (the “Company”), hereby and severally constitute and appoint Yamini Rangan, Kate Bueker, and Alyssa Harvey Dawson and each of them singly, our true and lawful attorneys, with full power to them, and each of them singly, to sign for us and in our names in the capacities indicated below, and to file any and all amendments to this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and to file the same, with all exhibits thereto, and other documents in connection therewith, with the Securities and Exchange Commission, granting unto said attorneys-in-fact and agents, and each of them, full power and authority to do and perform each and every act and thing, requisite and necessary to be done in connection therewith, as fully to all intents and purposes as each of us might or could do in person and hereby ratifying and confirming all that said attorneys and each of them, or their substitutes, shall do or cause to be done by virtue of this Power of Attorney.

Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, this report has been signed below by the following persons on behalf of the registrant and in the capacities and on the dates indicated.

 

Signature		Title		Date
/s/ Yamini Rangan		Chief Executive Officer		February 14, 2024
Yamini Rangan		(Principal Executive Officer)
/s/ Kate Bueker		Chief Financial Officer		February 14, 2024
Kate Bueker		(Principal Financial and Accounting Officer)
/s/ Brian Halligan	Executive Chairperson		February 14, 2024
Brian Halligan
/s/ Dharmesh Shah		Director and Chief Technology Officer		February 14, 2024
Dharmesh Shah
/s/ Alyssa Harvey Dawson		Chief Legal Officer		February 14, 2024
Alyssa Harvey Dawson
/s/ Nick Caldwell		Director		February 14, 2024
Nick Caldwell
/s/ Ron Gill		Director		February 14, 2024
Ron Gill
/s/ Claire Hughes Johnson		Director		February 14, 2024
Claire Hughes Johnson
/s/ Lorrie Norrington		Director		February 14, 2024
Lorrie Norrington
/s/ Andrew Anagnost		Director		February 14, 2024
Andrew Anagnost
/s/ Jay Simons		Director		February 14, 2024
Jay Simons

 

/s/ Jill Ward		Director		February 14, 2024
Jill Ward

 

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