Virtual events platform Hubilo raises $4.5 mn in seed round

The San Francisco headquartered firm has now raised $4.5 million in its seed round, led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, as it finds success in the new normal. 

Angel investors such as Girish Mathrubootham, CEO Freshworks; Nishant Rao, ex-CEO LinkedIn India; Jonathan Boutelle,co-founder, Slideshare, and Abinash Tripathy, CEO, Helpshift also chipped in the new round, according to a statement.

Hublio raised an undisclosed angel funding in November 2016 from Mathrubootham and 12 other investors. 

Founded in 2015 by Vaibhav Jain and Mayank Agarwal, Hubilo started its journey as an event management software provider. The company later pivoted to virtual event space after the Covid-19 pandemic affected business operations. 

The company offers gamified experiences to increase attendee engagement, and deep integrations with platforms such as Marketo and Salesforce to provide actionable insights to organisers and their sponsors. 

Hubilo claims to have grown over 40x organically and has projected to exceed $10 million in bookings run rate and host over 1 million attendees in the next few months.  

The company’s customers include organisations such as the United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech In Asia, Fortune and GITEX. According to Hubilo, it is seeing strong pull as well as repeat usage from clients in US, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) and APAC (Asia-Pacific) markets. 

“An average Hubilo client has returned to host 4 new and larger events within the last 6 months, some with over 80-100K attendees,” the company said in the statement. 

“Our vision is to build the world’s smartest platform for virtual events that brings experience  plus intelligence together. 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,” Jain said. 

Hubilo competes with Delaware and Bengaluru-based Airmeet which is backed by Sequoia Capital and raised $12 million in September. It also competes with communication platform Zoom, which recently launched its own events platform.