Virtual events platform startup Hubilo said it has raised $4.5 million seed round, led by Lightspeed and backed by marquee tech angels, Girish Mathrubootham (Founder Freshworks), Nishant Rao (ex-CEO LinkedIn India), Jonathan Boutelle (Co-founder, Slideshare), and Abinash Tripathy (CEO Helpshift).
The company claimed that since it's launched in April 2020, Hubilo has grown over 32x organically and is projected to comfortably exceed $10 million in bookings run rate and host over 1 million attendees in the next few months.
“While the revenue growth has been phenomenal, what excites us most is re-imagining and leading the marketing stack that will emerge around virtual events and unlocking massive value for key stakeholders such as CMOs, event organizers and sponsors,” said Vaibhav Jain, Founder & CEO of Hubilo.
“We do this through deep platform instrumentation and integrations that track attendee engagement, lead quality, and other event-related data. It is fantastic to have Lightspeed along in our journey as we ramp up a world-class team and business in the US and beyond,” Jain added.
Hubilo said that organisations such as the United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech In Asia, Fortune and GITEX are already using its platform. An average client has returned to host 4 new and larger events within the last 6 months, some with over 80-100K attendees, claimed the company.
The $800 billion global events industry was one of the hardest hit by the Covid-19 but organizers are migrating online rapidly and also expanding their attendee base.
For example, Apple's WWDC attendance went from 6,000 developers in 2019 to several million online this year.
