HubSpot is expanding its AI capabilities with the acquisition of Dashworks, a startup known for its AI-powered search and knowledge management tools. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the Dashworks team will be integrated to bolster HubSpot’s Breeze offering, specifically in areas such as search and content gathering.
“What’s impressive about Dashworks is its simplicity—ask a question, and it instantly pulls information scattered across documents, messages, tickets, teams, and third-party apps,” Nicholas Holland, HubSpot’s senior vice president and head of AI, said in a statement. “What used to take hours now takes seconds. We’re excited to integrate this powerful search into Copilot to create a true go-to-market assistant.”
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What to Know About Dashworks
Founded by Prasad Kawthekar and Pratyaksh Sharma in 2020, Dashworks set out to help workers find information, whether from documents, tickets, messages, or any other data source. That being said, it found itself in a crowded market, competing against companies like Glean, Qatalog, Atlassian, Dropbox, and Moveworks.
According to Crunchbase, Dashworks raised $9.5 million in venture capital. Institutional firms include Y Combinator, Point72, and South Park Commons. Twitch founder Emmett Shear, Goat Capital’s Justin Kan, and Gusto’s co-founders, Josh Reeves and Tomer London, were among the other investors.
HubSpot and Dashworks already had an existing integration before the acquisition happened, with the two platforms previously connected. Customers could connect Dashworks to their HubSpot account to search across contacts, company records, deals, and engagements. As Kawthekar noted in a blog post, both companies share an affinity for small to medium-sized businesses: “We’re thrilled that our ideal customer profile aligns perfectly with HubSpot’s incredible community of 250,000+ customers.”
He later added that HubSpot’s mission to “make AI accessible and useful daily resonates deeply with us” and his team will “power the truth engine behind reliable action engines in the age of AI agents and assistants.”
Improving the Breeze AI
Kawthekar, Sharma, and the Dashworks team will now focus on strengthening HubSpot’s AI product group, with a particular emphasis on enhancing Breeze—its end-to-end AI toolkit. Breeze includes three core components: Copilot, Agents, and Intelligence. With the addition of Dashworks’ team, these tools are set to gain powerful new capabilities, including deep search, advanced reasoning, and integration with unstructured data sources.
Concerning the Breeze Copilot, it’s one of the company’s most popular AI agents. Holland once told me that HubSpot’s small business customers “gravitate to first, and it has huge usage.” The bot is designed to boost productivity and streamline workflows, helping employees with their tasks whether directly in HubSpot, on the web, or mobile.
The company is touting that with the Dashworks acquisition, its AI tools will be able to better respond to questions, such as being asked to display the latest brand guidelines, show the status of sales accounts beyond what’s in the CRM, or help customer service representatives search the knowledge base for specific answers.
Although not explicitly stated, this deal is really an acqui-hire, not a traditional acquisition. Statements from both firms suggest HubSpot won’t be bringing over the Dashworks platform. And it wouldn’t be surprising for HubSpot, as it leans more towards building technologies in-house, as Andy Pitre, the company’s executive vice president of product, shared with me last year: “The HubSpot story is [that] the customer data is unified from the beginning. So, every single hub that you’re using, because we’ve taken what some might call the harder path of building a lot of stuff ourselves, rather than growing through acquisitions, all of the data is centralized in the CRM…And from an AI perspective, that’s a really important thing to have because the data you’re feeding to whatever…it needs to be powered by that customer data, because that’s where the prompts are coming from. That’s what you need loaded into a vector database. That’s what you need your LLM to be aware of…”
The collective knowledge of the Dashworks team will help empower the HubSpot platform to connect data from multiple sources more effectively. And by doing so, give SMB organizations the tools necessary to compete against much larger and resource-heavy enterprises.
“Dashworks and HubSpot share a commitment to making powerful technology accessible to businesses of all sizes,” Kawthekar declared in a statement. “With HubSpot’s leadership in go-to-market solutions and their advanced work with unstructured data, our next chapter with HubSpot will help even more businesses unlock the full potential of AI in their daily workflows.”
Featured Image: HubSpot has acquired AI search provider Dashworks. Image credit: Dashworks
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