UK startup Hopin, the remote live online events company, today announces it has raised €6 million in seed investment, led by venture capital firm Accel. The funds will be used to build out its platform, expand its team and quickly scale.
In a time where travel is increasingly seen as unsustainable for the planet, and global health emergencies become more commonplace, the global event industry is being forced to change and adapt. Hopin, founded in 2019, is an online venue where organizers can create, host and manage live events for up to 100,000 attendees. Easy to use, it takes only a few minutes to set up an event, such as a meetup, internal company meeting, hackathon, or entire conference, offering an unusually large cap of attendees at 1000 people.
Each event can be built as online-only, or layered on top of an existing offline event. For the latter, it offers a speakers’ live stream, and attendees can join sessions which create virtual roundtables with video-conferencing and chat features, a networking area over a video stream, and booths for businesses to showcase their products.
The idea was born out of founder Johnny Boufarhat’s own frustrations of not finding the right tools to collaborate and network with larger groups remotely. Hopin’s own team is fully remote and uses the platform to connect regularly. Boufarhat said, “We want to make sure everyone can experience the same great benefits of events — the connection you made bumping into someone in a breakout session, the potential customer you met at your booth or the awesome tip you got from a panel speaker – without having to physically attend. We are building the future of events and are thrilled to be partnering with ambitious investors like Accel and Northzone.”
Since July last year, Hopin has been available by early access and seen high demand, with over 1000 events hosted on the platform and a 10,000-strong wait list of event organisers. With this investment, Hopin will continue to build out its platform, expand its team and quickly scale.
This round was led by Accel, with additional participation from Northzone, Seedcamp, Web Summit’s Amaranthine Fund and Slack Fund. In addition, a number of high-profile angel investors participated, including Ilkka Paananen (Supercell), Daniel Dines (UiPath), Des Traynor (Intercom), Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (GoCardless) and Andrei Khusid (Miro).
Luciana Lixandru, who led the investment for Accel and will be joining the board, said, “At Accel we love investing in tools that bring people closer together. Hopin is the only platform that can truly replicate an offline event online, no matter the size. It is the answer for the enterprise with a distributed workforce that needs to plan an internal offsite, as well as the event organiser that needs to coordinate a conference with stages, workshops and networking. When we met Johnny and saw his drive and ambition, the incredible product and Hopin’s impressive organic growth, we knew this was a team with whom we wanted to partner.”
Northzone investor Paul Murphy added “We saw a vision in Hopin that’s bold enough to redefine the entire events industry, led by a founder with the conviction to pull it off. We’re excited to get to work with Johnny and the rest of the crew.”
via https://www.AiUpNow.com/ by contact@bcurdy.com, Khareem Sudlow
