Brian Halligan is back running the company he co-founded. HubSpot said Thursday that Yamini Rangan has stepped down as chief executive and left its board, and that Halligan, who led HubSpot for 16 years before she took over in 2021, is CEO again, effective immediately. The company is calling it a refounding.
The board has handed Halligan a broad brief. He will “reimagine HubSpot from the ground up – across product, go-to-market, and culture,” the company said in its announcement. The change comes eight days after HubSpot’s third-quarter report, in which Rangan said AI is moving software “from tools that help people do work to agents that do the work and deliver outcomes.” Bain has projected that routine software tasks could shift from “human plus app” to “agent plus API” within three years. Halligan also announced his return on X.
Halligan’s post calls HubSpot “the Customer Harness Company.” In the release he laid out the idea in three chapters. “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 platform that hundreds of thousands use every day. Chapter three is building the customer relationship harness that will enable millions to grow better,” he said.
The finance chair is turning over too. Chief Financial Officer Kate Bueker will retire on Feb. 11, 2027, in what HubSpot called a long-planned move, and Karen Burgess will succeed her. Burgess has been at Adobe since 2002 and most recently ran finance for its Creativity & Productivity unit, a $20 billion business. She joins HubSpot on Nov. 30 as executive vice president of finance. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission puts her base salary at $535,000, with a $500,000 signing bonus and restricted stock grants valued at $2.5 million in December and $8.5 million next March. The same filing says Bueker’s decision was not the result of any disagreement with the company over its financial statements, controls, operations or policies, and that she will stay on as an adviser through the end of 2027.
Rangan leaves with the company far larger than she found it. Under her, HubSpot grew from 135,000 customers to more than 311,000, and from $1.3 billion in revenue in 2021 to an expected $3.7 billion this year. She will remain an employee through Dec. 1 and, subject to a release of claims, receive severance benefits under HubSpot’s executive severance plan, according to the filing. “Brian knows this company better than anyone, and I have tremendous confidence in his leadership as HubSpot enters its next chapter,” she said.
The most recent quarter showed a business still growing at a double-digit pace. HubSpot’s third-quarter results, reported Nov. 4, included revenue of $947.6 million, up 17%, and 311,704 customers, up 12%. Average subscription revenue per customer rose 4% to $12,038. The company’s own forecast calls for fourth-quarter revenue of $945 million to $947 million, a 12% gain, and HubSpot reaffirmed that outlook and its full-year guidance Thursday. It also bought back $237.2 million of its stock during the third quarter.
Halligan, 59, never left the board. He has been a director since founding the company with Chief Technology Officer Dharmesh Shah in 2005, served as executive chairperson from September 2021 to May 2025 and has been a senior adviser at Sequoia Capital since May 2024. Lorrie Norrington, HubSpot’s board chair, said he “combines unmatched knowledge of our customers and culture with a clear vision for where AI takes our category.” Rivals are making their own moves. Salesforce agreed this month to acquire Cresta to add voice agents to its customer service products.
Two pieces of the plan are still to come. HubSpot has not finalized Halligan’s pay and will disclose it in an amended filing, and Halligan said on X that he will post in the next few days about why he is coming back and what he intends to do.
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