SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Hubilo, a global virtual events platform, is excited to announce a $4.5 million seed round, led by Lightspeed and backed by marquee tech angels, Girish Mathrubootham (Founder, Freshworks), Nishant Rao (ex-CEO LinkedIn India), Jonathan Boutelle (Co-founder, Slideshare), and Abinash Tripathy (CEO Helpshift). Starting its journey amidst the Covid crisis in April, Hubilo has grown over 32x organically and is projected to comfortably exceed $10 million in bookings run rate and host over 1 million attendees in the next few months.
The $800 billion global events industry was one of the hardest hit by the Covid-19 but organizers are migrating online rapidly and also expanding their attendee base. For example, Apple’s WWDC attendance went from 6,000 developers in 2019 to several millions online this year. Unlike many of its competitors that focus only on event management software, Hubilo is building a “system of record” for virtual events. On one end, Hubilo offers gamified experiences to increase attendee engagement, and on the other end, it offers deep integrations with platforms such as Marketo and Salesforce to provide actionable insights to organizers and their sponsors who can finally prove ROI from their event-related budgets.
With customers like the United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech In Asia, Fortune and GITEX already using Hubilo for their events - many having switched over from platforms such as Cvent and Hopin - Hubilo is seeing strong pull as well as repeat usage from clients in US, EMEA and APAC markets. An average Hubilo client has returned to host 4 new and larger events within last 6 months, some with over 80-100K attendees.
“Our vision is to build the world’s smartest platform for virtual events that brings Experience + Intelligence together,” shared Vaibhav Jain, Founder & CEO of Hubilo. “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 organizers and sponsors. 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.”
“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. The exponential traction and consistent repeat and expanded usage that Hubilo is seeing demonstrates 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,” added Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed.
About Lightspeed
Lightspeed is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. Since 2000, Lightspeed has backed entrepreneurs and helped build companies of tomorrow, including Snap, Affirm, OYO, Nutanix, Byju’s, and Udaan. Lightspeed and its affiliates currently manage more than $10 Billion across the global Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in India, Silicon Valley, Israel, China, Southeast Asia and Europe.
