HubSpot raises $35 million mezzanine round

Company will operate "as if public," can an IPO be far off?

Inbound marketing system HubSpot has raised a $35 million mezzanine round, the company announced Monday.

The new funding came “a number of large institutional investors, including Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital.” Hubspot did not name the other investors, but AllThingsD is reporting that Fidelity Investments also participated.

HubSpot had previously raised a total of $65 million, including a $32 million round led by Google Ventures, Salesforce, and Sequoia Capital, with participation from previous investors General Catalyst Partners, Matrix Partners and Scale Venture Partners in March 2011. The new funding brings HubSpot’s total funding to over $100 million total.

This new money will be used for hiring, expansion and to accelerate growth.

HubSpot, which was founded in 2006, helps companies get found online using search engine optimization and marketing leveraging blogs and the blogosphere and engaging in online social media. The company helps the company find more prospects and then convert them into leads and customers.

HubSpot is growing quickly, the company wrote, and it released some pretty impressive numbers to back it up.

“We're generating revenue at an annualized run rate of $60 million, up more than 80% over last year, and we still see a huge market opportunity ahead of us,” HubSpot CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan in a statement.

The company has generated over 56 leads, and now employs more than 400 people, up over 100 hires a year ago. HubSpot will use its funding to hire an additional 55 people by the end of this year.

Some of its recent hires include Akamai CFO JD Sherman as its COO last spring, which was just a start, HubSpot said. Since then, it has also added NetSuite CFO Ron GiIl as audit committee chair on its board of directors, John Kelleher as General Counsel, and most recently, Chris McLellan as its Chief Security Officer.

HubSpot has over 8,000 customers in 56 countries, and expects to see revenue of $54 million this year.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company is also set to open its first international office: it will be coming to Dublin, Ireland in 2013. HubSpot already serves 600 customers and 100 partners internationally, and says that it expects to see significant international growth with the new office.

So, with the company growing in terms of customers, hires and offices, is the plan to go public soon?

HubSpot sure makes it sound like it, saying that it is going to be operating “as if public” from now on.

“In case you’re wondering, yes. It’s significant that our new investors are institutions that invest in many publicly traded companies. HubSpot is implementing processes to operate “as if public” throughout our internal procedures and staffing,” the company wrote.

The reason that the company took on the new investment was for one reason, the company write: to grow.

“We’ve arrived at a scalable, reliable fast-growing model that works and that serves tens of thousands of marketing professionals at our 8,000 customers. Now it’s time to hit the gas even harder by hiring more of the world’s top inbound marketing and software talent, opening up to accelerating demand from global markets, and acquiring some of the most promising marketing software startups and talent in the world.”

"Our goal has always been to build a successful, enduring, independent company that transforms how the world does marketing,” Halligan said in a statement. “This financing sets us up for big investments in hiring and acquisitions so that we can continue to change the way the world does marketing."

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