The Acquisition Paradox: When Selling Your Company Means Scaling Your Vision
Frame AI's founder George Davis traded independence for the chance to scale his mission to 250,000 businesses—and learned that the right acquisition partner can amplify your impact beyond what you imagined possible.
Written by: Alex Sventeckis Photography: Elli Bock
Summary
- Frame AI faced a founder's ultimate dilemma: After seven years building AI for enterprise clients, Davis had to decide whether to trade independence for HubSpot's ability to scale their mission to 250,000+ businesses
- The acquisition collapsed "five or ten futures" into one certainty: Davis describes a grieving process for all the paths Frame AI wouldn't take, even as the team recognized joining HubSpot was likely their best outcome
- Cultural due diligence mattered more than spreadsheet math: Davis studied how HubSpot employees disagreed, why ex-employees boomeranged back, and whether the company lived its vision, finding a culture where "people voted with their feet and consistently chose HubSpot"
- Speed became the deal's secret weapon in the AI gold rush: Skipping investment bankers and leveraging their partner ecosystem as natural buyers, Frame AI closed the acquisition fast enough to capture both a timing premium and maintain team momentum
- Davis went from CEO of 20 people to Director at 7,000+: and found unexpected freedom – While accepting a "down-level" at HubSpot, Davis discovered he could finally "leave work at home" and be present with his three kids, trading the title for actual impact at scale
Introduction
When George Davis joined HubSpot’s SVP of Engineering Manoj Sibakumar for dinner, he expected technical talk and got a reflection of his life’s motivation instead.
By then, Davis was seven years into running Frame AI. Around 20 employees joined CEO Davis and cofounders Robbie Mitchell, Jesse St. Charles, and Brandon Reiss in helping companies intelligently use unstructured customer data. The company’s AI tool worked for several dozen enterprise clients, but they were seeking their next horizon.
So when Davis received a cold outreach message from HubSpot Ventures, he answered. A few conversations later, he was dining with Sibakumar to talk about the future of AI — and of Frame AI.
Davis felt like a 90s kid at Carnegie Mellon University again, wanting to use machines to help people make decisions they couldn’t before. What Frame AI was doing for its enterprise clients, HubSpot wanted to do for over 250,000 small and medium-sized businesses.
Davis started Frame AI because he loved its mission. HubSpot promised to scale that mission to new heights.
But love costs. In Frame AI’s case, the cost was independence: help more companies, but do it under someone else’s name.
Was it worth trading independence for scale?
“I thought maybe we could be an external vendor to HubSpot to help them accomplish these goals,” said Davis. “And Manoj convinced me that the best way to do it was from the inside.”
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When Futures Collapse
Seven years into business, Frame AI stood at a crossroads. Davis and his team saw multiple partnership opportunities with new and exciting avenues to chase. So many futures to consider.
Then, the possibility of acquisition became real. Futures collapsed. That can be hard to process.
“As a startup, you can always envision five or ten futures for yourself. When that actually collapses down to one future for yourself, there’s a grieving process for all the different things you might have been,” said Davis. “Even if this is the best thing you could be, you still had other things that you thought you might do.”
As acquisition talks matured, Davis considered where Frame AI fit. Founders often see acquisitions fall into one of three categories: team, technology, or business, each carrying tradeoffs for buyer and seller.
Frame AI ended up fitting the “technology acquisition” model. The most familiar AI tools react to a user’s prompt, pulling data from storage to generate responses. These frameworks run well when data has logical structures.
But not all data gets neatly defined. Specifically, what customers say or write doesn’t always fit in checkboxes and tables. Support conversations, contact center logs, and social and messaging apps generate tons of information, but structuring it in usable formats is too tough for most businesses.
That’s the problem HubSpot found in its massive customer base of small and medium-sized businesses. Companies generated oceans of customer interaction data, with huge potential hiding under the surface. But HubSpot needed specialized functionality to help its buyers retrieve, process, and use unstructured data intelligently.
Frame AI’s “Stream-Trigger Augmented Generation” (STAG) framework addressed that need. Its model swims in the constant stream of customer interaction data, ingesting and reviewing in real time. It can flag patterns and raise concerns or ideas proactively instead of waiting for human queries. In Davis’s view, this shifts AI’s role from a “knowledge” tool to an “awareness” one.
HubSpot wanted Frame AI’s technology and its ability to create a consistent awareness of business opportunities for its customer base. And many possibilities collapsed into one certainty: acquisition.
3 Types of Acquisitions
When Davis discusses the three types of acquisitions (team, technology, and business), here’s what those mean:
- Team: Your buyer wants your talent. Your product might not fit your buyer’s strategy, but your people do.
- Technology: Your buyer wants your product. It has strategic value for them, and they want your product on their roadmap.
- Business: Your buyer wants your customers, revenue, or market share. They’re trying to consolidate their market position with a revenue boost to boot.
Acquired companies can fit one, some, or all of these needs, depending on who’s buying and why.
Due Diligence Goes Both Ways
Independence surrendered is damn near impossible to retrieve. The upsides for Frame AI and HubSpot seemed aligned. But before trading independence for scale, Davis and the team wanted to ensure their connection went both ways.
Culture sometimes gets a bad rap as a “soft” component. If the team and tech fit (and the money’s good), why sweat anything else?
After Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020, the companies’ cultures failed to mix. Culture took a backseat to scalability, and years of quiet internal organizational suffering followed.
That kind of mismatch stems from a “split-brain” problem, as Davis calls it, where product vision and product economics diverge.
“We worked closely with one company in that situation. They had the company they wanted to be and the company they really were. That created constant tension, where no decision could be made without compromise,” he said. “A business that’s split-brained in that way can’t really partner on a vision.”
Of course, Davis didn’t envision that split-brained future for Frame AI. He undertook cultural due diligence.
“For us, culture mattered more than the spreadsheet math. We wanted to know how do people disagree here, how much autonomy do they have, do they really listen to customers?” he said. “Those were the things we weighed most heavily, because they determine whether your team will thrive after the deal.”
Davis didn’t stop with HubSpot’s culture deck. He listened, observed, and prodded to uncover genuine insights into how people treated each other. He found that public disagreements ended with friendly outcomes. Ex-employees boomeranged back into HubSpot’s waiting arms. People voted with their time and their feet, and they consistently chose HubSpot.
Davis paid special attention to HubSpot’s version of a shared vision for helping businesses thrive through data. Was that clear in the company’s daily work? Did HubSpot live the vision, or was it a slideshow attraction?
Two HubSpot leaders crucial to winning over Davis were Andy Pitre (then Chief Product Officer) and Yamini Rangan, HubSpot’s CEO. Both centered the vision on caring about the product experience and the customer’s voice. The customer mattered at every organizational level.
“That gave me confidence that our technology wouldn’t just get shelved; it would be championed,” said Davis.
In January 2025, HubSpot announced it had successfully completed the acquisition of Frame AI.
If a founder faces changes to their business or customer relationships, being direct about it and turning it into collaboration is the best path forward.”
— George Davis, Director of AI Product at HubSpot
Making Space for Feelings
When Davis told his company about the acquisition, most employees saw the same envisioned future. Joining HubSpot offered chances for continuity, impact, and growth. They could still accomplish their goal; the road to get there just looked a little different.
Some took extra convincing. Not because they doubted or dismissed the acquisition, but because they shared Davis’ longing to know what could’ve been.
“Even inside our team, people felt the grief of paths we weren’t going to take. I remember our head of sales saying, ‘I get that this is the better choice, but man, I don’t like leaving this other one behind,’” he said. “That was a very real sentiment, and it’s part of the founder’s job to help the team process it.”
Much like the AI tools Frame AI built, processing new data requires a model, something foundational that buttresses organizational change. Davis and his cofounders sought to model the emotions of change.
Sometimes, change is intangible and hard to fathom. He openly acknowledged the grief of collapsing futures and invited team members to share discomfort, fear, and worry.
And sometimes, change is obvious, like when your job title changes. Entering a larger organization meant matching up with a new org chart.
George on AiSummit 2025 panel. Photo by AO Photography © HubSpot for Startups
“Almost all of us — obviously from the CEO on down — were down-leveled when we joined HubSpot. No CEO of a 20-person company should expect not to be,” he said. “That meant we all had to put aside some ego coming in, which I think was really important. You don’t know how to do the new job yet, and you have to be willing to learn.”
Of course, customers mattered, too. Frame AI was supporting a few dozen enterprise clients who suddenly faced changes in how they did business. Frame AI had six months to wind down its client roster.
The company had built its product to let clients co-create their best setup. Few things in life bond people as strongly as intense configuration sessions. Frame AI lavished time and energy on customer success, and customers returned their care in kind.
That extended to the individual client contacts, many of whom had achieved success through symbiosis.
“We had helped them reach more successful positions, and they were helping us by bringing us into their businesses,” said Davis.
Wind-down conversations took extra empathy. Davis notes some client chats got emotional — a testament to how much Frame AI really cared about people. A few “clammed up” as they faced a new reality (and an impending search for a new vendor). Many others cheered on Frame AI’s team, a celebration of a professional, fraternal love.
Whether with an employee, a customer, or a partner, Davis sees change as an opening for something greater.
“Anybody telling you about a change is giving you an opportunity to work together on the implications. That applies to both sides of the conversation,” said Davis. “If a founder faces changes to their business or customer relationships, being direct about it and turning it into collaboration is the best path forward. And on the other side, even if the change isn’t by your choice, you still have a partner willing to talk it through with you.”
Closing Good Deals Fast
AI as a concept has existed for decades, and companies used it long before ChatGPT hit the scene. But GPT 3.5 opening for public use in November 2022 ushered in an AI wave — especially in business settings. Just listen to an S&P 500 company’s earnings call: In 2025, the term “AI” has seen a 263% increase over the 10-year average.
AI is so hot right now, and everyone’s gunning for a piece. In this “highly active” market, speed is life or death. Frame AI and HubSpot recognized this reality, and moving fast became a winning decision point.
“A lot of the value to HubSpot was how fast we could get on board and help accelerate their AI pipeline. And on our side, I didn’t want my team to lose momentum,” said Davis. “So speed was valuable for both of us, and committing to a quick process worked in everyone’s interest.”
Traditionally, an acquisition process needs bankers to run a structured process, evaluate a startup’s value, and drum up bids. Frame AI embraced speed and skipped the investment banker route to reach a deal sooner. Davis figured they knew their own market better than anybody else through deep, ongoing partnerships, like helping Twilio build an AI-upgraded contact center experience.
A healthy partner ecosystem transformed into a flock of suitors when the For Sale sign went up.
“In addition to HubSpot, we had other suitors that we were talking to very actively,” said Davis. “Several of them had a chance to evaluate the technology and were interested and involved, and that helped us set a price.”
Bartering between potential buyers helped Frame AI calculate a fair valuation — which got a nice boost from a timing premium. AI is a hot commodity, and Frame AI’s specific functionality enthralled buyers. The right tech at the right moment helped Davis and his cofounders close a great and fast deal with HubSpot.
Life After the Handshake
Post-acquisition, Davis transitioned from CEO of Frame AI to the Director of AI Product at HubSpot, reporting to HubSpot’s Head of AI, Nicholas Holland. Starting out, Davis figured he’d focus narrowly on incorporating Frame AI’s technology into operations. Life had other plans.
AI’s rapid rise had HubSpot exploring AI in multiple formats like generative tools, integrated vendor tech, and other core infrastructure. Many projects could yield tremendous fruit, but the company needed the AI boats rowing in the same direction.
Enter HubSpot’s new Director of AI Product. Davis took on HubSpot’s “AI Platform Pillar,” the unifying effort to capture AI’s biggest benefits. It excited him, even if it caught him off guard.
“I didn’t really expect to have a broader responsibility in the first six months. I think the timing may have been somewhat accidental, but it’s definitely kept things very interesting,” said Davis. “I’ve felt agency, I’ve felt the impact.”
Managing momentum isn’t foreign to a founder who’s scaled a company. But that’s when founders can get somewhat dictatorial with their work. Not so at a company with over 7,000 employees.
“Probably one of the biggest adjustments has been understanding that at a large company, you can’t move things forward either by being the only solution or by dictating a solution,” said Davis. “There are always going to be lots of related projects happening all around the company. You have to treat it more like a community and find motions that bring those threads together.”
This different approach is already yielding hints of the dream from that first dinner. Frame AI’s technology is transforming into a “context layer” that collects unstructured customer data and info from other sources to feed HubSpot’s AI suite. The context layer unifies data sources as a shared brain to run better AI experiences for a quarter-million HubSpot buyers.
Not bad for a 20-person company.
Plus, when the day ends, Davis can close the laptop and spend time with his family. His wife also works in tech, and they care for three elementary school-aged children.
His kids have known him as the dad “doing the startup thing.” Now, though, work doesn’t consume every quiet moment of family life. Independence looks a little different during story time before bed.
“Things are still very fast-moving and very dynamic. But I get to leave it a bit more when I go home,” he said. “That’s pretty nice.”
"If you’re learning and you feel like you have an impact, then that’s a really positive experience."
— George Davis, Director of AI Product at HubSpot
Wanna Get Acquired? Choose and Commit
In Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, after taking the road less traveled, the narrator knew that “I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence.”
Was it a sigh of joy? Nostalgia? Yearning? Regret?
Time will tell what feeling Frame AI’s choice of scale over independence will bring. Davis has already sighed over unrealized futures.
But dwelling in the past does little good, he believes. After all, founders (and, really, everyone) make irreversible decisions daily. Once you’ve made your choice, “burn your ships” and leave the ocean of possibilities behind.
That full-throated belief comes from knowing your true motivation — something Davis encourages founders to nail down. Do you want everyone to call you the CEO? How about a fat bank account? Or maybe you’re hoping to make an enormous impact?
Whatever you choose, commit. Davis committed to multiplying his mission by letting go of his company. In the end, love may cost. But so far, he’s found joy in how much more Frame AI can accomplish with HubSpot.
“If you’re learning and you feel like you have an impact, then that’s a really positive experience,” he said. “If your objective is a title, you can always give yourself the title you want at home. But if you’re learning and having an impact, that’s what really matters.”
Author: Alex Sventeckis
Alex Sventeckis is a content strategist and marketing instructor at Ball State University. Through his consulting work, he helps startups and brand teams turn smart ideas into meaningful content that delivers results. He writes frequently about AI, marketing, and how people connect today. Off the clock, he’s probably walking his rescue dog, Dimples, or sipping a strong cup of coffee.
