- Hubilo has seen a growth rate of 10,000% in less than 12 months in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic
- Hubilo to acquire office space in London, and build out its teams in the UK and across Europe
- Its global customer list includes the United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech in Asia, Fortune, AWS, Siemens
LONDON, Feb. 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Hubilo, the global virtual and hybrid events platform, has announced a £17 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 £3.2m seed round in November 2020 and is a testament to the belief in Hubilo's vision for the sector.
Exactly a year ago, Hubilo witnessed its revenue as a successful in-person events company begin to collapse as the pandemic took hold. In an innovative pivot, Hubilo gave itself just 26 days to build an entirely new platform from the ground up to answer the customer demand driven by the pandemic and emerged as one of the leading platforms for experiential virtual events, growing its month-over-month revenue consistently by 50% ever since enrolling its first paid customer in April 2020.
CMOs widely acknowledge that Covid-19 has permanently disrupted the event landscape. From a $78B market capitalisation in 2020, the virtual events sector is now expected to grow nearly tenfold to $774B over the next decade. Much of the physical events landscape's value is expected to shift to new virtual and hybrid delivery models permanently. Hubilo is at the forefront of this transition and plans to build on its momentum by expanding its sales teams across Europe, acquiring office space in London, hiring on-ground teams in the UK and US and investing further in the product and design teams based in India.
The Series A funding will also be used will also help accelerate the development of Hubilo's platform, with an increased focus on enabling businesses to develop authentic connections with their customers to develop stronger long-term relationships. In the next few months, Hubilo plans on rolling out several features that will enable stronger attendee engagement and new monetisation opportunities for organisers.
Hubilo has already hosted more than a million attendees on its platform - without the all too common "Zoom fatigue". Organisers see increased attendee engagement through built-in networking features including meeting tables, private rooms, meeting schedules, and gamification features such as leaderboards. Organisers 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 organisers, sponsors and other stakeholders. We're excited to welcome our investors onboard as we begin this next phase of global expansion."
Suranga Chandratillake, General Partner at Balderton Capital, added "The financial cost and productivity, as well as the climate hit of traditional, in-person events, can be huge. Until the Covid-19 lockdowns, however, our collective inertia meant that nothing had changed. The Pandemic has demonstrated that virtual and hybrid events can be as engaging as physical ones and substantially cheaper to run and attend, more profitable for organisers and contributors, and more inclusive for attendees. Hubilo is at the heart of this revolution of how people meet and ideas get exchanged, and we are excited to be partnering with them for their journey."
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 2021virtual event to build a more vital collective understanding of the power of experiential digital events and their benefits.
About Hubilo:
Virtual and Hybrid Event Technology Company Hubilo is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, today, globally. Hubilo has witnessed a growth rate of over 10,000% in less than a year and has raised a seed round of $4.5 million and a Series 'A' round of $23.5 million from leading Venture Capital firms like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital along with several renowned angel investors; Hubilo is headquartered out of San Francisco in the US with offices in London in the UK, and Bengaluru in India with clients in Europe, the United States, APAC, Middle East and Africa. Hubilo's extensive clientele includes names like United Nations, Roche, Informa Markets, Tech in Asia, Fortune, AWS, Siemens, Cognizant, Veritas Technologies, GITEX and several others. Led by Founders, Vaibhav Jain and Mayank Agarwal, Hubilo is building out the world's most comprehensive digital platform to help businesses strengthen their relationships with their customers and partners through virtual and hybrid events.
About Balderton Capital:
Balderton Capital is a London-based venture firm focused exclusively on backing the best European-founded technology companies. In the two decades since our founding, we have worked with hundreds of extraordinary European founders, and have raised eight funds totalling more than $3bn. Previous exited investments include Betfair (FTSE: BET), Digital Surgery (Medtronic), Frontier Car Group (OLX Group), Magic Pony (Twitter), NaturalMotion (Zynga), Peakon (Workday), Recorded Future (Insight Partners), Sunrise (Microsoft), Talend (NASDAQ: TLND) and Yoox Net-a-Porter (BIT: YNAP). Among Balderton's current portfolio of over 90 companies are Aircall, Carwow, Citymapper, Contentful, Darktrace, Depop, GoCardless, Graphcore, Kobalt Music, Nutmeg, Prodigy Finance, Revolut, SOPHiA Genetics, Tessian, THG (LON: THG), VanMoof, Vestiaire Collective, Vivino and Zego.
