Today, we’re announcing our $6.5 million round led by Accel and joined by an all-star cast of venture funds, including Northzone, Seedcamp, Web Summit’s Amaranthine Fund and Slack Fund, as well as a number of awesome angel investors.
We couldn’t wish for a better team of experts to have on board as we bring our live online events tech platform to market.
At Hopin, we are building a platform that reproduces the experience of in-person events — the networking, interaction, the content and connections — but in a more accessible, safe, and sustainable way. By bringing an event such as a conference, summit, or workshop onto Hopin, whether as a virtual add-on experience or entirely web-based, brands can facilitate their events for a much larger global audience at a far less cost to the planet.
With this end in mind, we’ve built Hopin for scale. Right now, our events can host up to 100,000 concurrent attendees but we are actively working on developing the technology to increase this number to one million.
Our early access wait-list has grown rapidly and the variety of use cases we’re seeing from brands that want to use Hopin is multifarious. From large-scale conferences to meetups, to trade fairs and cause-based organizations, to crypto hackathons and remote companies — the verticals Hopin serves are creative and wide. We’re seeing events as cool as yoga sessions, pottery seminars, music festivals, and more.
In this vein, we’ve found that events are almost as unique as humans. They can vary quite a bit. To address this, we designed Hopin to be a modular virtual venue. It can be customized to fit an event organizer’s unique goals.
Hopin’s feature set is aimed at fixing several of the problems in the multi-billion dollar virtual event industry, namely the lack of quality, face-to-face interaction between participants. Traditional video-conferencing programs and “webinar” platforms provide a modal for viewing content with a smaller number of people. But it is difficult to meaningfully connect with other people at a virtual event and it becomes even harder at scale. Our solution to this problem is to offer an all-in-one platform with different modes of live video interaction that make large events feel small again, including one-on-one (networking), one-to-many (broadcasting), and many-to-many (group conferencing).
Our mission is to create better connections for a better world. My hope is to see more people build better relationships by being able to go to more events that they normally wouldn’t be able to attend. When we remove barriers to people coming together in an authentic way, we can start to win the battle against loneliness and isolation.
A year ago it was just me, building a networking platform from home. Today, we are a remote team of 15 and we’re growing fast. As one might expect, we use Hopin ourselves to collaborate and meet together regularly. With this funding round, we’ll be rolling out Hopin over the next few months, scaling our processes and team (we’re hiring), and partnering with individuals and brands around the world to launch some fantastic events.
We have the utmost gratitude to our investors, advisors, and early access community. We’ve come a long way and we’re excited for what’s ahead.
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