The company announced Thursday (Nov. 12) that it is replacing its chief executive officer and chief financial officer with Co-Founder/ex-CEO Brian Halligan returning to take the top job. He replaces Yamini Rangan, who is stepping down.
“I am grateful for everything Yamini has done for HubSpot. She brought a deep commitment to our customers, took the company to a new scale, and built a strong leadership team,” Halligan said in a news release. “Chapter one was creating the inbound marketing category and building a killer app that thousands enjoyed. Chapter two was building an easy and powerful CRM [customer relationship management] platform that hundreds of thousands use every day. Chapter three is building the customer relationship harness that will enable millions to grow better. This is a refounding, and I can’t wait to start!”
In addition to the CEO transition, HubSpot also announced what it called the “long planned retirement” of Kate Bueker, its finance chief, effective Feb. 11 of next year. She will be replaced by Karen Burgess, currently CFO of Adobe’s Creativity & Productivity business unit.
A report on the transition by Bloomberg News noted that the move comes during a year in which HubSpot’s stock has lost half its value amid cooling growth and the fears about AI-related disruptions that have rocked a number of software companies of late.
“I don’t want to see HubSpot swallowed up by a private equity firm or shrink—I want to rebuild it and reimagine it,” Halligan said in a Thursday interview with Bloomberg, adding that he intends to overhaul the company’s product, culture and sales processes.
He said one of the company’s strengths is how it allows users to navigate its platform with AI, including with tools like Anthropic’s Claude. But he argued the company might have concentrated too much on short-term financial targets and not enough on product development.
“Companies are going to have to pivot pretty quickly to new models—they’re going to have to be very, very AI-pilled,” Halligan said, encouraging a renewed entrepreneurial passion for the technology.
Americans are already making that pivot, according to PYMNTS Intelligence research showing that the share of U.S. adults using AI for personal reasons leaped five percentage points to 54%, between December and January.
“In other words, for all the backlash against the technology, most Americans are now using AI in their daily lives,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year. “People aren’t just dabbling. Most of those users are mainstream or power users, performing eight or more tasks using AI each month. That’s a steep adoption curve.”
