Virtual events platform Airmeet raises $12 mn in Series A round

Virtual events and meeting platform Airmeet has announced raising $12 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital. While its holding company Airmeet Inc is registered in Delaware, its Indian subsidiary Airmeet Networks Pvt Ltd is based in Bengaluru.

California headquartered Redpoint Ventures, which has backed firms such as HashiCorp, Netflix and Stripe, also joined the round. Other participants in the round included returning investors Accel India, Global Founders Capital and Venture Highway, along with DoorDash executive Gokul Rajaram.

The company will use the fresh capital for product development and to expand its customer base over the next two years through marketing and advertising, co-founder Lalit Mangal told TechCircle. 

It last raised capital in a $3 million extended seed funding round, led by Accel India, in March. 

After building out real estate platform CommonFloor, which was acquired by Quikr in 2016, Lalit Mangal with fellow CommonFloor executives Manoj Singh and Vinay Jaasti started Airmeet in August 2019.  

“My previous venture was in the real estate sector where ups and  downs in the market directly affected the platform. This time around, we wanted to build something with a consistent demand,” Mangal told TechCircle. 

The company will continue to remain a remote entity with its current strength of 60 employees working across six countries, he added. 

The virtual events platform provides features such as social lounge and speed networking, similar to offline conferences. Currently in the late beta stage, the platform allows users to conduct events for free for upto 300 people at a time. 

Airmeet has seen 2,000% growth in the past quarter due to Covid-19 lockdown, and the subsequent move to remote work and networking. 

“We are already seeing an irreversible behaviour change among event organisers and an exponential rise in what we call ‘digitally native events’,” Mangal said in a statement issued by the company.

The platform has nearly 30% of its customer base outside India, and is used to organise university resource fairs and technical summits. 

“Covid-19 has accelerated a permanent behavioral shift across many industries. With digitisation of largely traditional spaces leapfrogging by years, the $800 billion-plus global offline events space is up for grabs. There is massive potential for players who drive the industry’s transition towards online events,” Abhishek Mohan, vice president at Sequoia Capital India, said in the statement.

Airmeet competes with California headquartered communication platform Zoom, which provides virtual meeting solutions to enterprises and saw a four-fold jump in paid users in India from January to April 2020. Jio Meet and Google’s video conferencing platform Meet also operate in a similar space.