How the Techstars Network Brought Warmly and Immagnify to HubSpot

Six pivots. Three years without product-market fit. One exit to a company doing over $3 billion in revenue.

That's the arc of Warmly (Techstars 2020), the AI-powered lead generation company co-founded by Maximus Greenwald. Warmly went through Techstars Boulder in 2020, and recently, HubSpot announced it was acquiring the company.

We sat down with Maximus to talk about the journey, and it's a good reminder that the best businesses rarely look anything like the idea a founder started with.

A First Try, and a Real Start

Maximus left a product manager job at Google in San Francisco to start a company with a few former colleagues. Their first idea: a swipe app to help founders find co-founders.

"Our very first idea was actually Tinder for co-founders, which was a terrible idea, and it went horribly. But it got me started," Maximus said.

It also got him to the Techstars Boulder Accelerator. Drawn back to his home state of Colorado, Maximus and his team applied and, by his own account, got lucky. They were early, pre-revenue, and mid-pivot into their second idea: a swipe app for connecting professional communities.

Mentor Madness and the Pivot to B2B

Techstars Boulder paired the team with dozens of mentors through Mentor Madness, back-to-back 60-second pitches to 30 or 40 mentors in a single day. Maximus remembers the pitch being rough enough that the team brought cookies to apologize.

The feedback that stuck: most of the mentors had B2B backgrounds, and they were candid about the odds facing a consumer social app. That input from mentors pushed the team toward B2B, specifically toward building for salespeople.

It took three years and six pivots to find product-market fit. The team tried and dropped several ideas before landing on a lasting problem: helping sales teams find warm leads by identifying anonymous website visitors and matching them to the right buyers. The company's name says it all: Warmly, because warm leads convert better than cold ones.

A Second Techstars Company Joins the Story

Part of Warmly's growth came through another Techstars alumni connection. About three years in, the team wanted to pair their AI with better data. A mutual investor and former Techstars Mentor, Eric Kerby, introduced them to Immagnify (Techstars 2021), a Techstars Tel Aviv company building lead data for sales teams. Warmly acquired Immagnify in January 2024, and its founders joined the team to help build out Warmly's data engine.

"It's a big win for them and the whole Techstars community, that [HubSpot], a publicly traded company doing over 3 billion in revenue, was so excited about us that they wanted to bring us on to join their mission," Maximus said.

What Techstars Actually Gave Them

Beyond mentorship and funding, Maximus points to something less tangible: a peer group of fellow founders going through the same struggle at the same time.

Warmly's cohort held a weekly roundtable with all 10 CEOs and a professional coach. Maximus recalls breaking down in tears during one of the early sessions, certain that everyone else in the room was more capable than he was, until he realized every founder at the table was carrying similar doubts.

"And that's just the empathy of, wow, everybody's struggling. This thing is hard for everybody... That's part of the job, part of the journey," he said.

What's Next

Warmly now serves more than 400 customers, and about 70% of them already run HubSpot as their primary CRM. Maximus is joining HubSpot's product team to keep building on that foundation.

Looking back, he's most proud not of the exit itself, but of what building Warmly taught him about being a founder.

"The only chart that will always go up and to the right is your self-actualization over time. That's one that I hope every founder pins to their computer screen, or writes it for themselves," he said.