What the business is
Cacheflow built no-code dashboards for configuring quotes, closing deals, and upselling and renewing B2B software customers.
Starting capital
$16M raised from backers including GGV's Glenn Solomon and GV (Google's corporate venture arm).
How it started
Cacheflow was founded in 2021 in San Francisco by Sarika Garg — former head of product management at SAP's Ariba Network and chief strategy officer at Tradeshift — and Brian Zotter, former VP of engineering at Salesforce who co-founded YesPath, acquired by Medium in 2017.
What happened
By December 2022 it had around a dozen customers and 16 employees, and had raised $16M. HubSpot's Commerce Hub, launched in 2023, went on to process more than $1 billion in gross merchandise value — and was missing exactly the subscription billing and CPQ pieces Cacheflow had built.
How it ended up
On 2024-10-11 HubSpot announced it had acquired Cacheflow for an undisclosed sum. Cacheflow becomes a wholly owned subsidiary and its team joins HubSpot's Commerce Hub org — HubSpot's first acquisition since buying Clearbit for $150M in 2023.
What has to be true
CPQ and billing are unglamorous but sit on every B2B software deal — automating them compounds across the whole sales cycle.
The founders' SAP Ariba, Tradeshift and Salesforce backgrounds gave the young startup instant credibility with enterprise buyers.
For HubSpot, buying a focused CPQ-and-billing team was faster than rebuilding Commerce Hub's missing pieces.
What can be applied
Selling to software sellers is a niche with fast word-of-mouth — and exactly the kind of focused product a platform acquires instead of building.
Aftermath
As of 2024-10-11 Cacheflow is set to become a wholly owned HubSpot subsidiary once the deal closes, with the team joining the Commerce Hub org; Stifel told investors the deal signals HubSpot's continued focus and a possible 'relaunch' of the under-discussed SKU. HubSpot shares rose 1.3% in late morning trading on the announcement.
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