HubSpot in the AI stack

The business and what the filings show

HubSpot sells a customer platform, a CRM plus marketing, sales and service software, aimed mostly at small and mid-sized businesses. Over its latest four quarters it reported $3.4B of revenue, +21% on the year before, at an 83% gross margin and a 4% operating margin, with free cash flow of $797M. No single customer represented more than 10% of its revenue in 2025, 2024 or 2023, but its 10-K says Solutions Partners and the customers they referred produced about half its 2025 revenue.

Its AI is Breeze, which HubSpot describes as powering the whole platform: AI-generated content, insights and automation for marketing, sales and service teams, plus agents that take on parts of that work. Because HubSpot already holds its customers’ contact and deal data, it can sell AI features against data the customer has already put into it.

HubSpot is the mid-market version of Salesforce’s test. Smaller companies adopt new tools faster but also leave them faster, and AI may make it easier for a small business to run marketing and sales with fewer people and fewer seats. Revenue growth and what customers pay per seat are where HubSpot’s AI story will be judged.

How AI shows up in the numbers

AI shows up at HubSpot as Breeze features and agents inside its existing products, sold to existing customers and used to win new ones. Its filings do not separate AI revenue, so the read is growth against the layer, gross margin as AI usage rises, and how specific its earnings releases are about AI results.

For scale, HubSpot’s revenue over the latest four quarters equals 1% of the $566B the five largest buyers spent on capital projects over their latest four quarters. Their capex rose +81% on the year before, while HubSpot’s revenue grew +21%: slower than the spending, so it is capturing a smaller share of each new capex dollar, or more of its business sits outside the build-out.

How it talks about AI

In its latest earnings release, furnished to the SEC on October 6, 2026, HubSpot mentioned AI 4 times in 718 words of narrative text, about 5.6 mentions per 1,000 words. Of its 4 sentences about AI, 0 included a number: a revenue figure, a growth rate, a customer count or another measurable result. Across the 8 releases we read, back to February 12, 2025, AI mentions per 1,000 words went from 2.8 to 5.6.

Specific claims are easier to check against the numbers than general enthusiasm, which is why the share of AI sentences that carry a figure is worth watching alongside how often AI is mentioned. The sentences below are quoted from the release as published, after removing safe-harbor text and company boilerplate.

• “Why are we taking this step Over the past year, we have shifted our strategy from building software that helps customers grow to delivering outcomes for them with AI.”
• “This is not driven by AI-related efficiencies.”

Source: earnings release (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1), October 6, 2026.

The trend in the numbers

Since the start of 2023, HubSpot’s largest quarter by revenue was Q2 2026 at $912M, and its highest gross margin was 85% in Q4 2024. The latest quarter set the revenue record for the period.

Quarter by quarter, HubSpot’s revenue grew +21% in Q3 2025, +20% in Q4 2025, +23% in Q1 2026, +20% in Q2 2026 on the same quarter a year earlier. The pace has been steady.

Gross margin in the latest quarter was 82%, against 84% a year earlier, so more of each new dollar is passing through to costs. Operating margin moved from −3% to 5% over the same span. Over the latest four quarters it turned 25% of its revenue into operating cash flow and spent 2% of revenue on capital projects, against 2% a year earlier.

Where it sits in the stack

HubSpot sits in the software and applications layer of the AI stack. It sits at the top of the stack, where revenue from end customers has to come from; its own spending flows to AI clouds.

Among the 27 companies in this layer on our map, it ranks number 15 by revenue and number 14 of 27 by revenue growth. Its gross margin of 83% compares with 78% for the layer as a whole, a sign that it keeps more of each dollar than its neighbors. The full layer analysis is on the software page.

Latest four quarters for 10-Q filers; latest fiscal year for 20-F filers. Companies under $100 million of revenue are left out.

Against the 27 US-listed companies in its layer, HubSpot grew +21% over the latest year versus +19% for the layer combined, and converted 23% of revenue into free cash flow versus 33% for the layer. It is growing roughly in line with its layer.

What has to go right, and what could go wrong

What has to go right. Breeze has to make small and mid-sized businesses more effective at marketing and selling, in ways they pay more for, while those businesses keep buying seats for their teams.

What could go wrong. If AI lets small businesses market and sell with fewer people, or AI-native tools offer the same features cheaply, HubSpot could see seat counts and prices come under pressure at once.

These describe the conditions the business depends on, as the filings show them. They are not a view on the stock.

Through the lens of Investing in AI

Rob May’s book offers six mental models for telling AI moats from traps. The one most useful for HubSpot’s layer is “AI challenges traditional SaaS assumptions”: Per-seat pricing, zero marginal cost, smooth ARR curves, and automatic land-and-expand break down when software does work on your behalf. The mistake is not using SaaS instincts. It is using them automatically.

The question it asks of any company is: What work is this product actually doing, and how does pricing map to it? Applied to HubSpot, the filings on this page are the place to start: the margin trend shows whether it holds scarce value or passes it through, the customer and financing disclosures show who it depends on, and the commitments show what it has promised before the revenue arrives.

Customers and concentration

US companies must disclose any customer that accounts for 10% or more of revenue, and foreign filers usually describe their largest customers. Concentration matters because a company’s growth is only as durable as the handful of buyers behind it, and in the AI stack those buyers are often the same few companies.

• “No single customer represented more than ten percent of our revenue in 2025, 2024, or 2023.” 10-K, February 11, 2026

Commitments and backlog

• Backlog. HubSpot reports $1.7B of remaining performance obligations, 0.5 times its revenue over the latest four quarters: contracted revenue not yet earned.

What to watch

HubSpot’s next quarterly report will cover the quarter ending around September 29, 2026. Large companies must file a 10-Q within 40 days of a quarter’s end and a 10-K within 60 days of the fiscal year’s end, so the new figures should arrive by about November 28, 2026 at the latest. This page, the layer pages and the next quarterly report all update from that filing.

• Revenue growth against the layer, and against Salesforce’s, the comparison its customers make.
• Gross margin, where the cost of running Breeze would appear.
• Whether HubSpot starts charging for agents or outcomes rather than seats.
• Its place in the next quarterly AI Stack Report, which updates every company on the map from the new filings.

Figures from HubSpot’s SEC filings, latest period ended June 30, 2026. Other companies: all company pages.