The virtual events space continues to grow with today’s announcement that Hopin has raised $400 million in a series C round of funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. The round values the U.K. startup at a staggering $5.65 billion.
It has been a whirlwind 20-month period for Hopin, which was founded fortuitously in June 2019 before the pandemic put human-to-human meetups on hold. The company raised a $6.5 million seed round 12 months ago, followed by a $40 million series A in June and a $125 million series B in November that valued Hopin at $2.1 billion. For extra context, Hopin has grown its headcount from just six at the start of 2020 to 410 today. In the three months since its last funding, the company said it has added 30,000 new customers, including Hewlett Packard, American Express, Poshmark, and the Financial Times.
A quick peek across the broader events landscape reveals a similar trend as businesses of all sizes invest in technologies that help them reclaim some semblance of “business as usual” while adhering to strict social distancing protocols. More than that, the pandemic has shone a light on the inherent benefits of online events, which enable companies to scale conferences with fewer resources and access myriad data points that can help sales and marketing teams correlate digital interactions with business objectives. It’s clear investors are betting their bootlaces that online events are here to stay, either as a standalone format or as part of a new hybrid model.
Besides the usual features that ship with standard online events platforms, such as ticketing, breakout rooms, live video streaming, and networking tools, Hopin’s “big sell” to businesses is that it brings data and trackability to the mix. This includes insights into interactions and behavior at a user level, the ability to track or follow up with potential leads following a virtual booth visit, targeted marketing, and more.
Businesses can access a visual summary of the data that matters most to them from an event, from real-time analytics on which breakouts or areas are proving most popular to expo booths, the number of messages and networking meetings, and deep insights into how visitors move from space to space.
Hopin also targets enterprise-level businesses specifically with myriad integrations enabled through Zapier, including Salesforce, Slack, Hubspot, and Mailchimp. This also enables businesses to use their own single sign-on (SSO) systems to enable participants to log in to Hopin, which may be particularly crucial for confidential internal company meetups.
Hopin said it will use the fresh funding to scale its platform and team and “build better products,” founder and CEO Johnny Boufarhat told VentureBeat. “We recognize that the world is shifting to a new state, so we are investing in a reality where reaching people across the globe is not only easy and accessible but can be more meaningful than ever before through our products,” he said.
Although he wouldn’t specify any particular upcoming features or products, Boufarhat did suggest that security would be on the company’s radar. “Hopin is specifically focused on building out additional security and customization features for our enterprise customers,” he said.
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