Friday, August 19, 2011

HubSpot confirms buy of oneforty Inc.

By Rodney Brown

Hubspot Inc. yesterday confirmed the rumored acquisition of social media application site oneforty Inc. for undisclosed terms, continuing its purchase path of Cambridge neighbor companies.

According to a release on the Hubspot blog — which was structured as a series of 140-character tweetable sentences — the directory of social media applications that is the core of oneforty will be merged into the HubSpot App Marketplace. Laura Fitton, oneforty founder and CEO, and her team will be joining HubSpot’s team in its Cambridge office immediately, the statement said. Fitton was named a Mass HighTech Women to Watch honoree in March.

Last month oneforty launched SocialBase Handbooks, a small business version of its enterprise-grade SocialBase On Call service for planning and managing social campaigns. Elements of SocialBase will also become part of HubSpot, the release stated.

In March, HubSpot raised $32 million in a late stage round with two California venture capital firms – Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures – and strategic investor Salesforce.com Inc. At the time, CEO Brian Halligan said the company was looking to purchase other inbound marketing companies, and in June acquired Performable Inc., also based in Cambridge. With this latest acquisition, HubSpot now has 285 employees, the company said.

HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah was named a Mass HighTech All-Star in 2009. The company was self-funded in 2006 by Halligan and Shah, and has raised a total of approxiamtely $65 million, with other backers including Venture Scale Partners of California, General Catalyst Partners of Cambridge and Matrix Partners of Waltham.

Fitton founded Oneforty in 2009 after establishing herself as an early presence on the social microblogging service Twitter, under the handle, “@Pistachio.” Oneforty focused on being an aggregator and recommendation service for Twitter apps until it expanded to a wider social media circle in February.