Hubilo, a leading global virtual events platform, announced that Alkeon Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital are investing $125 million in Series B funding to further the development of the future of events and engagement on Hubilo’s platform. This brings the company’s total funding to $153M to date in less than 18 months. The investment, one of the largest in any virtual events platform, 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 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 six 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.”
Hubilo saw revenues dwindling to zero 18 months ago, but refusing to give up, they reworked their technology in 26 days, and 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 more than 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 six-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 more than one trillion dollars of direct spending on events. In the last couple of years, 15-20% have permanently moved to digital events. These changes are permanent. I expect in the next few years that Hubilo will be broadly acknowledged as a leader in the space,” says 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.
As the new era of events unfolds in an era of uncertainty, one thing remains steady: Hubilo’s innovation and commitment to foster human connection through the reimagination of events.
Hubilo is the virtual + hybrid event platform built for engagement and event excellence. Hubilo’s mission is to drive engagement – first and foremost – yielding greater business results. With a 24/7 fully dedicated customer success team, the industry’s largest suite of engagement and gamification features, and robust branding capabilities, Hubilo is the architect of the new reality for future events. Led by Founders Vaibhav Jain and Mayank Agarwal, the company is headquartered out of San Francisco, with a base office in Bengaluru in India. Hubilo’s clients include names like Walmart, United Nations, AB InBev, Roche Pharma, Echo, GITEX, and several others across the United States, Europe, APAC, Middle East, and Africa. In less than a year, Hubilo has raised a Seed round of $4.5 million, a Series ‘A’ round of $23.5 million, and Series ‘B’ round of $125 million from leading Venture Capital firms like Alkeon Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Balderton Capital, and Lightspeed India Partners, and several strategic angel investors.
