Hubilo, the global virtual and hybrid events platform, has announced a $23.5 Million Series A investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital, alongside several industry experts and luminaries, including John Thompson, Chairman of the Board at Microsoft, and Chris Schagen, Former CMO at Contentful. This funding comes just months after Hubilo’s $4.5 Million Seed round in November 2020. It is a reflection of the exponential growth in Hubilo’s business and investor belief in Hubilo’s vision for a category that represents the largest fraction of marketing budgets globally.
Exactly a year ago, Hubilo witnessed its revenue as a successful in-person events company collapsing as the pandemic took hold. Hubilo rose to the challenge by doubling down on its virtual events platform, adding hundreds of features in less than a month to support the needs of the largest and most demanding conferences in the world. Customers responded very positively, citing the ease of use, expansive feature set, and white-glove support for why they selected Hubilo. As a result, Hubilo has emerged as one of the leading platforms serving the high-end of the virtual events and trade show market, growing its month over month revenue by over 50% consistently since enrolling the first customer for its virtual events platform in April 2020.
CMOs widely acknowledge that Covid-19 has permanently disrupted the event landscape. Virtual events are a key part of how businesses connect with their customers, attracting a far broader set of attendees and speakers than physical events. There’s also an increased sense of urgency around ensuring that physical events become hybrid with a digital overlay that brings the benefits of virtual events to the physical world. These two trends are resulting in a rapid shift of 10s of billions of dollars to virtual event platform providers. Hubilo is at the forefront of this transition and plans to build on its momentum by expanding its sales teams globally, with new offices in San Francisco and London and a rapid build-out of its sales, marketing and customer success teams out of those offices.
The Series A funding will also help accelerate the development of Hubilo’s platform, with an increased focus on enabling businesses to develop authentic connections with their customers, developing stronger long-term relationships. In the next few months, Hubilo plans on rolling out several features that will enable stronger attendee engagement and new monetization opportunities for organizers.
So far, Hubilo has already hosted more than a million attendees on its platform – without the all too common “Zoom fatigue.” Organizers see increased attendee engagement through built-in networking features including meeting tables, private rooms, meeting schedules, and gamification features, such as leaderboards. Organizers also love the one-click integration with existing go to market platforms, including HubSpot, SalesForce and Marketo, enabling them to demonstrate ROI through event data integrated with their existing workflows. These integrations ensure Hubilo’s data-driven insights can help marketing and sales teams be more effective in connecting with their customers.
“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 organizers, sponsors and other stakeholders. We’re excited to welcome our investors onboard as we begin this next phase of global expansion.”
Guru Chahal, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, added, “Events are undergoing a massive secular shift in two ways; a dramatic increase in virtual events, and the rapid evolution of physical events to hybrid events, resulting in billions of dollars of marketing budgets getting reallocated to a new category of digital platforms. In our research, some of the most demanding customers worldwide made it clear that Hubilo was their trusted partner in both these categories, virtual and hybrid. We are delighted to lead Hubilo’s Series A funding and use Lightspeed’s global resources to support their exponential growth.”
In March 2021, over 4000 marketing professionals, 40 CMOs and 400 event industry professionals from around the world will come together for Hubilo’s two-day Restart 2021 virtual event to build a more vital collective understanding of the power of experiential digital events and their benefits.
