Victor Pontis and Danqing Liu were on different career paths, but found themselves working together on a concept to help a friend who’d been laid off. That concept ultimately became Luma.
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The company now provides a platform for people to host virtual classes, record live shows, educate, and find their communities via Zoom, Pontis told Crunchbase News.
Now armed with its first-ever funding round of $3 million, San Francisco-based Luma is focused on further development of the platform and its traction. Maven Ventures and Venrock led the seed investment.
“We started by helping our friend who wanted to keep teaching yoga classes online but found it hard to host the classes, engage with members and process the payments, and she ended up using it for a bunch of other purposes,” Pontis said. “Now that everyone is familiar with Zoom, the opportunity is much larger to help people build an online presence and community.”
Online events and classes have exploded while the world is staying home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past year, we’ve reported on a number of startups that have attracted investment while working to bring typical in-person events and activities to the virtual masses. Those include Run The World, Hopin, Wave, Popshop and Ribbon Experiences.
Since its founding at the end of March and its launch a week later, Luma now works with more than 10,000 people hosting events that have attracted more than 500,000 attendees. A few hosts are even on pace to bring over $100,000 in revenue this year, he said. In addition, to keep up with the demand the company expects to hire three more people by the end of the year.
The company is preparing to launch its next product, Luma Profile, which is a page for hosts to showcase their best work and see how well they trend across different social media platforms. Hosts will also be able to sign up attendees for emails and offer membership services.
“This will make Luma the hub for someone’s business and make it easier for them to have an online home and storefront,” Pontis said. “The next step is collaboration tools so if someone is hosting a podcast on Luma, they will be able to see where else people have appeared on Luma, as well as host a joint class with someone else on the platform.”
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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