• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 4, 2024

Alphabet, Google's parent company, has met with Morgan Stanley investment bankers about a potential offer for HubSpot, a software company 

The tech giant has been in discussions with Morgan Stanley about a potential offer price and whether antitrust regulators would clear such a sale, the sources added.

An offer has not been made as of yet, according to Reuters, citing sources. 

HubSpot, which has a current market valuation of $32 billion, is a third-party platform that allows marketers to integrate customer relationship manager (CRM) data with Google Ads.

Google Ventures, the company's investment arm -- along with Sequoia Capital and Salesforce.com in 2011 -- invested $32 million in a Series D funding round.

At the time, HubSpot Cofounder Brian Halligan explained in a blog post that the company plans to invest in research and development that supports "inbound marketing," which taps optimized search web content and applications.

HubSpot and Google expanded the partnership in 2018. The company adopted Google Cloud to support its international cloud infrastructure. The partnership allowed the company to invest more in its current Google Cloud product integrations and accelerate the growth of HubSpot's Free CRM.

HubSpot recently began using artificial intelligence (AI) and a chatbot to support clients.

The company allows marketers to import data for Customer Match and Offline Conversion Import as well as export data from Google Ads through Lead Form Assets.

HubSpot generated $2.2 billion in revenue in 2023, and posted a net loss of $176.3 million.