Hopin Raises $40M As Demand For Virtual Events Continues To Rise

Virtual events platform Hopin nabbed $40 million for its Series A, at a time when virtual events are needed more than ever.

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IVP led the round, which included participation from new investor Salesforce Ventures and existing investors Accel, Northzone, Slack Fund and Seedcamp.

Hopin, which is based in London, lets users attend virtual events–pretty much the only way for large gatherings to happen in the age of COVID-19. Users for virtual conferences can watch keynote sessions, attend networking events, or join breakout sessions. The company wants to create the same benefits of an in-person event without the expenses and extra logistical hassles like travel.

“The global vision for Hopin is to be the best online venue for any event,”  CEO Johnny Boufarhat said in a statement. “We are building a solution to what has been missing for so long: a platform people can use to build online events that match the dynamism of an interactive, in-person experience.”

Hopin is among a growing number of online-event companies, including Cvent, Attendify and Teooh. Avatar-based virtual event platform Teooh announced funding from Spark Capital and General Catalyst today, bringing its total seed funding to $4.5 million. Hopin, founded in 2019, last raised $6.5 million in seed funding.

We wrote about Hopin back in early March, when large events around the world were being canceled left and right as COVID-19 fears mounted. The startup, which had come out of stealth just weeks before, was seeing a growing number of interested parties lining up on the waitlist (at the time of our previous story, there were 18,000 organizers on that list).

Now, the company has more than 50,000 customers on the waitlist with more than 1,000 joining every day, according to a statement from the company. It’s scaled to nearly 1 million users who have attended events hosted by more than 16,000 organizations, including the United Nations, NBCUniversal and Adobe.

Disclosure: Salesforce Ventures, an investor in Hopin, is also an investor in Crunchbase, the parent company of Crunchbase News. Crunchbase’s investors are listed as part of its Crunchbase profile. For more about Crunchbase News’ editorial policies on disclosure, see the News team’s About page.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.