SAN FRANCISCO — Hubilo, a global virtual events platform, announced a $125 million Series B funding round led by Alkeon Capital and additionally, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital. The new fund will h development of the future of events and engagement on Hubilo’s platform. This brings the company’s total funding to $153 million to date in less than 18 months. The investment, one of the largest in in the event technology category, signals the importance of many-to-many communications at a time when uncertainty about COVID-19 and its variants have resulted in cancelled conferences and delayed a return to traditional office environments.
The Series B funding will supercharge Hubilo’s continued international growth by allowing the company to develop new business functions, advance innovation of its platform, strengthen its product, engineering, and design teams in India, and go-to-market teams in the US, UK, EMEA, and APAC. Hubilo also plans to set up new sales offices in key regions to expand its operations and reach a greater volume of customers. In addition, Hubilo will also increase the overall employees’ count by 150% to support its rapid growth plans and to respond to the increased customer demand for virtual and hybrid events.
“The power to engage with massive audiences unlocks the potential of new diverse, geographically dispersed communities to exist, remote workforces to stay engaged, and organizations to rethink the way they hire and train. The potential ahead of us with this investment is massive,” said Vaibhav Jain, CEO and founder at Hubilo. “But what we’ve learned over the last 6 years is that an intuitive platform is just table stakes. Our commitment to event organizers is that we will always provide a dedicated event team to ensure flawless execution of every event. This is why so many event organizers make Hubilo their platform of choice.”
When the pandemic hit in 2020, Hubilo saw revenues dwindling to zero but refused to give up. After relentlessly reworking their technology in 26 days, they emerged as one of the leading architects of many-to-many communications. Since then, they’ve worked with some of the biggest names globally with the likes of Walmart, Blackboard, United Nations, Roche Pharma, AB inBev and 800+ more clients who use Hubilo for a variety of external and internal meetings and events. The platform’s advantages are so apparent that over a quarter of first-time users switch to an annual subscription model after they host their first event on Hubilo’s platform.
Hubilo’s team has grown tenfold over the last 18 months. The funding will be used to expand Hubilo’s global footprint, build out new functionalities, and deliver on Hubilo’s product vision for the future of events.
What differentiates Hubilo is their 6-year track record for building effective AI-driven event engagement algorithms which gave them a solid foundation for understanding the needs of event planners as well as a loyal client base. This differentiator attracted the interests of a host of investors in an oversubscribed funding round less than 7 months after their Series A was announced.
“We believe strongly that the global distributed workforce is a megatrend that will impact all of us in the future. It is clear that the way we collaborate and connect will need to be rearchitected in order for any global player to succeed,” said Abhi Arun, Managing Partner at Alkeon Capital. “In Hubilo, we saw a powerful technology capable of connecting the offline and online worlds, a strong CEO, and an amazing market opportunity that gave us the confidence to invest.”
Now that the Delta variant has cemented the need to rethink every meeting and event strategy for the long term, companies realize that collaboration and communication technologies are essential for more than just events. While Hubilo started as an events technology platform, its solutions go beyond special occasions.
Businesses spend over one trillion dollars of direct spending on events. In the last couple of years, 15-20% of the enterprise events budget has permanently moved to digital events. Hubilo is one of the fastest growing and innovative platforms serving this market. I expect in the next few years that Hubilo will be broadly acknowledged as a market leader in the space,” said Guru Chahal, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
By making audience engagement infinitely scalable, organizations now have the potential to use events to communicate and engage more frequently and effectively. For instance, sales kickoffs no longer need to be limited to only one time a year but can be conducted quarterly or even monthly. Career fairs can attract qualified candidates from a broader talent pool. Diversity initiatives can become less performative and more meaningful when tools exist to truly engage communities in a dialogue, rather than just force them to listen.
