Hubilo, the virtual and hybrid events platform which helps businesses in hosting events, has secured £17 million funding in Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital.
Other industry experts and luminaries, including John Thompson, Chairman of the Board at Microsoft, and Chris Schagen, Former CMO at Contentful, also participated in the round.
The investment round comes just a couple of months after Hubilo’s £3.2 million seed round in November 2020.
How will the funding be used?
The funding will be used to help accelerate the development of Hubilo’s platform. The company aims to acquire office space in London, and build out its teams in the UK and across Europe
The company also plans to roll out several features that will enable stronger attendee engagement and new monetisation opportunities for organisers.
Event analytics platform
Founded by Mayank Agarwal, and Vaibhav Jain, Hubilo develops an event analytics platform designed to help businesses strengthen their relationships with their customers and partners through virtual and hybrid events.
The platform hosts an interactive online event, connects attendees globally, and builds meaningful connections by organising breakout sessions, thereby enabling event organisers to create, promote, manage, and analyse events on a single virtual event platform.
So far, the company has hosted more than a million attendees on its platform – without the all too common “Zoom fatigue”. Hubilo has seen a growth rate of 10,000% in less than 12 months in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The company works with clients including the United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech in Asia, Fortune, AWS, Siemens, Cognizant, Veritas Technologies, GITEX, and several others.
Increased attendee engagement
Hubilo says that the organisers see increased attendee engagement through built-in networking features, including meeting tables, private rooms, meeting schedules, and gamification features such as leaderboards.
“We’ve experienced remarkable growth over the last few months thanks to our vision of placing experience and intelligence at the forefront of virtual events,” said Vaibhav Jain, Founder, and CEO, Hubilo. “Our strategy, product features, and platform intelligence are expanding the possibilities of what is achievable in the events space, and we’re continually delivering greater value for event organisers, sponsors, and other stakeholders. We’re excited to welcome our investors onboard as we begin this next phase of global expansion.”
Suranga Chandratillake, General Partner at Balderton Capital, added, “The financial cost and productivity, as well as the climate hit of traditional, in-person events, can be huge. Until the Covid-19 lockdowns, however, our collective inertia meant that nothing had changed. The Pandemic has demonstrated that virtual and hybrid events can be as engaging as physical ones and substantially cheaper to run and attend, more profitable for organisers and contributors, and more inclusive for attendees. Hubilo is at the heart of this revolution of how people meet, and ideas get exchanged, and we are excited to be partnering with them for their journey.”
Hubilo is headquartered out of San Francisco in the US, with offices in London in the UK, and Bengaluru in India with clients in Europe, the United States, APAC, Middle East, and Africa.
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