Cacheflow's CPQ-and-billing bet for B2B SaaS ended in a HubSpot acquisition

Cacheflow built no-code dashboards for configuring quotes, closing deals, and upselling and renewing B2B software customers.

That no-code configure-price-quote plus subscription management could shorten B2B software sales cycles and automate revenue capture

$16M raised from backers including GGV's Glenn Solomon and GV (Google's corporate venture arm).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.