Refine Labs' first acquisition adds HubSpot, Marketo, and attribution expertise. CEO Megan Bowen explains the Vivid Vision behind the MOBI Solutions deal.
Megan Bowen
A few months ago, I shared publicly that Refine Labs was looking to acquire agencies with complementary capabilities.
I was clear about which service lines we were hoping to acquire including: Marketing and revenue operations. Analytics. SEO/GEO. Brand research and measurement. Customer expansion. The goal is to build a stronger platform around Brand > Demand > Expand so our clients can solve more of the growth problem with one team.
Today, we took the first real step toward that vision.
Mark and I have acquired MOBI Solutions - a marketing operations and analytics agency founded by Rachel Squire - to join the Refine Labs portfolio of agencies.
For years, Refine Labs has been strongest in strategy, pipeline reporting, demand, media, creative, and helping B2B companies rethink how they generate growth. But there has always been a point where our work runs into the systems and data underneath it. HubSpot. Marketo. Attribution. Reporting. CRM architecture. The operational layer that determines whether a good strategy can actually be measured, understood, and scaled.
We’ve had clients ask us for that work. We’ve referred it out. We’ve worked around it. Sometimes our own teams have taken on reporting work that frankly should have had deeper marketing ops support behind it.
MOBI Solutions excels in this area of expertise.
Rachel built an analytics-first marketing operations company with deep HubSpot and Marketo expertise and experience with Clay, HockeyStack and Salesforce. The team works inside the infrastructure that connects marketing activity to the rest of the GTM engine, the exact layer we knew we needed to get better at.
So this acquisition expands our services and it’s also a very tangible step toward the company we have been saying we want to build.
Earlier this year, I shared our three-year Vivid Vision with the Refine Labs team. I spent months working through what I actually wanted this company to become by the end of 2028.
There are two ideas at the center of it.
First: Refine Labs should be a Talent Destination. I want the most ambitious people in B2B marketing to be able to do the best work of their careers here. People Success = Customer Success = Company Success. This is the decision-making model I want us to use as we build the company.
Second: I want Refine Labs to be the partner B2B companies trust to drive profitable growth without compromising strategy, creativity, or brand.
That means our capabilities have to grow too.
Brand > Demand > Expand is bigger than paid media or demand generation. If we are serious about helping clients build a durable growth engine, we need to be able to connect strategy to execution, execution to systems, and systems to data. We need to help clients understand what is actually happening across their GTM engine.
Our Vivid Vision specifically calls for stronger reporting, benchmarks, and data infrastructure that give clients a level of insight they cannot get today. MOBI moves us materially closer to that future, much faster than trying to build the capability from scratch.
Adding a new service line alone wasn’t enough, the team and culture mattered just as much.
When we got deeper with Rachel and MOBI, the overlap was obvious. Extreme ownership. Direct communication. Strategic value over checking boxes. An analytics-first mindset. A remote team that cares deeply about the work and the customers they serve.
Rachel said during our early conversations that she could have written Refine Labs’ non-negotiables herself - which was a strong signal of cultural and values alignment.
Acquisitions can look great in a spreadsheet and still be terrible for the people involved. I have zero interest in building that kind of company.
The point is to create more opportunity on both sides. MOBI gets a larger platform, more support around the business, and more room for the team to grow. Refine Labs gets a discipline we do not have deeply in-house today. Our customers get access to more expertise. And both teams get to learn new skill sets from each other which further fuels their professional growth and development.
We take care of people and customers first.
We are not going to spend the next 30 days changing every system, renaming everything, and forcing two companies into one operating model because that makes an integration checklist look complete.
For current Refine Labs clients, your team and the work already underway are not changing because of this announcement.
For current MOBI clients, the priority is the same: continuity in the people, quality, and relationships you already know.
Behind the scenes, the teams will start getting to know each other and we’ll begin identifying where the combined expertise can create real value. Over time, marketing operations and analytics will become a deeper Refine Labs capability. We’ll build that deliberately instead of pretending it is fully integrated on day one.
I’ve been pretty open that acquisition is part of how I want to grow Refine Labs.
Not because M&A is interesting on its own. It isn’t. The reason is much simpler: there are capabilities our customers need and talented teams already doing those things exceptionally well. In the right situation, bringing those teams together creates more value and more opportunity faster than either company can create alone.
MOBI is our first acquisition under that strategy. It will not be the last if we can continue finding companies where the customer fit, capability fit, economics, and — most importantly — people fit are all there.
We still have a lot of work to do to realize the Vivid Vision. That is kind of the point of having one.
But this is one of those moments where the thing that lived in a Google Doc starts becoming real.
Rachel and the MOBI team: welcome to Refine Labs. I’m really excited about what we get to build together.
More to come.
If you’re a Refine Labs client and want to talk about where marketing operations or analytics could support your team, reach out to your account lead. If you’re an agency founder building a complementary capability and this sounds like the kind of platform you’d want to be part of, reach out to Megan directly.
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