HubSpot Ventures: Accelerating an Agentic Future

In December 2024, we shared our view on where the industry was headed: AI agents would change how small businesses and startups operate by completing complex work end-to-end. We believed that agentic systems would give SMBs access to capabilities that previously were out of reach and expand the types of outcomes that software can deliver. 

Over the last 5 quarters we have seen this become reality, and supported that thesis with more than 21 investments, from early-stage companies like Omada, Mintlify, and Edra to scaling leaders like ElevenLabs and Lovable that are already bringing this vision to reality. It was a significant period of growth for us too as we dramatically increased our investment pace, revamped our website, hosted our first INBOUND in San Francisco, and expanded our investment team. We also worked closely with our founders to forge integrations and partnerships with HubSpot, and saw portfolio companies like Hightouch, Clay, and Vanta raise at multi-billion dollar valuations as they continued to scale. 

Now, heading into the second quarter of 2026, it is more clear than ever that the agentic era has arrived. The pace of change is accelerating, and the opportunity for entrepreneurs to bring these capabilities to SMBs has never been larger. We want to use this post to provide an updated view on where we are focused as a fund and the trends shaping our industry.

HubSpot Ventures’ focus areas

Based on what we’re hearing from founders, customers and internal teams, we’re concentrating new investments in four areas:

• Agentic Applications for SMBs: AI agents and intelligent applications that deliver clear outcomes for marketing, sales, service, finance, operations, and back office workflows. This includes deeply vertical and industry-specific agents for SMB-heavy industries. 
• Core AI and Agent Development Tools: Developer tooling for evals, safety & security, browser use, and multi-agent orchestration that make agents more reliable and easier to deploy, along with new foundation models and voice/vision capabilities.
• Content & Creativity: Specialized models and tools for creating rich media and web content, growth and advertising, and supporting creators’ workflows.
• Collaboration & Communication: As work shifts to hybrid teams, we will invest in new surfaces for collaborating across agents, humans, and companies.

Major AI themes we’re tracking in 2026

Services as Software: This trend has been visible since the early days of LLMs, but it’s set up for broader adoption in 2026. Companies like GrowthX, Omada, and Crosby are building firms that sell outcomes using agents as the backbone of delivery. It will take special combinations of industry experts and AI-native technologists to truly deliver winning experiences for customers, but we are excited about investing in the next generation of autonomous service providers.

Open Claw & Personal Productivity Agents: The first quarter of 2026 has been defined by OpenClaw and the agent architecture it has defined: always-on and proactive agents that can operate inside a user’s environment (files, apps, browser, internal tools), run on schedules, and improve with ongoing feedback. OpenClaw has created a movement and shown what is possible, even if early versions weren’t practical or safe for everyone. We will see more “managed” versions from established players like Airtable’s Hyperagent and Perplexity’s Computer, and SMB-focused versions like Klaus that make these agents easier to deploy for mainstream businesses and users.

Multimodal products moving into vertical workflows: Voice and multimodal models have reached a level of reliability that supports production use cases in new industries. We’re seeing voice agents adopted in SMB-heavy sectors like logistics (e.g., Happy Robot, Fleetworks), and home services (e.g., Rilla, Avoca), and healthcare (e.g. Bland), often with clear and immediate ROI. We’re excited to see voice AI continue to proliferate in new verticals, and new uses of computer vision applied to industry-specific workflows in construction, manufacturing, and other fields that contain millions of SMBs.

Generative media and next-generation AdTech: Video and image generation quality have improved considerably over the last year, changing what is possible for advertising. The practical result: more teams can produce usable creative without a full production team or big budgets. As distribution gets more competitive, paid acquisition and targeting discipline will matter even more. This is especially true for SMBs and local businesses, and we are excited about founders building tools that personalize ads, measure and attribute ROI, and use agents to manage bids and budgets across channels using tools like Vector, Paramark, and Mai.

Open-source models and on-device AI: Open-source and open-weight models continue to narrow the gap with closed frontier models for many tasks. This improves the unit economics of application-layer startups and makes it realistic to run capable models on-device for privacy, latency, and cost. We expect products like OpenRouter to keep thriving, and are excited to see more teams pushing inference to the edge to reduce costs, improve the customer experience, or limit the exposure of sensitive data.

HubSpot Ventures’ role

Our approach remains tied to HubSpot’s mission: make powerful technology accessible to SMBs, startups, and scaling companies so they can grow better. We believe the transition to agentic AI is still early and not evenly distributed, and it will be talented founders who accelerate it. Startups will build entirely new categories by pushing AI agents deeper into business workflows and creating autonomous operating systems for every vertical. It is our job to support and accelerate that future.

HubSpot Ventures is supporting this mission with a renewed capital commitment to continue investing at the frontier of AI for the benefit of our customers, founders, and HubSpot. We are targeting 10-16 investments in 2026 with checks ranging from $500k-$10 million, and are working with founders at all stages of their journey.

If you're building in any of the above areas, we'd love to hear from you!