San Francisco-based Hubilo, a global virtual events platform, on Monday said that it has raised $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from a clutch of angel investors in which includes Jonathan Boutelle, Co-founder of Slideshare; Abhinash Tripathy, CEO of Helpshift; Nishant Rao, ex-CEO of LinkedIn India); with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-founder & CEO of Freshworks. The new flashed first on YourStory.
The startup is planning to deploy the fresh funds towards building the world’s first Intelligent Hub for Virtual Events. Launched in April 2020, Hubilo claims that it has grown close to 40x organically, and expecting to exceed $10 million in booking run-rate and to host over one million attendees in the next few months.
Speaking of the investment round, Vaibhav Jain, Founder & CEO of Hubilo, in a statement, said,
“Our vision is to build the world’s smartest platform for virtual events that brings experience + intelligence together. 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 organisers, and sponsors.”
Speaking of the technical aspect of the virtual events solution provided by Hubilo, Jain added,
“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.”
Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed, said,
“Hubilo is, hands down, one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies we’ve ever seen. We had been looking for a founder to back in this market for a long time, and Vaibhav is a true Lightspeed founder: a strategic builder who has plans to change the sector, lead it globally, and an intense passion for and deep insights on this market from having previously run a hybrid events company.”
Affirming their confidence in Hubilo, Mohapatra further added,
“The exponential traction, consistent repeat, and expanded usage that Hubilo is seeing demonstrate strong customer loyalty, all of whom had superlative things to say about the platform. Hubilo will become as critical to events as Salesforce is for sales, and HubSpot for marketing,”
Hubilo, in a statement, said that it is witnessing recurring usage from clients across US, EMEA, and APAC markets, and an average Hubilo client jas returned to host four new and larger events within the last six months – attracting over 80 to 100,000 attendees.
The platform also offers deep integrations with other platforms like Marketo and Salesforce to provide insights to organisers and their sponsors – helping manage ROI from the events hosted via Hubilo. Besides this, the platform also encompasses features to increase attendee engagement.
Hubilo’s clientele includes the United Nations, Fortune, GITEX, Roche, Informa Markets, among others.
