Hubilo has raised $4.5 million in a new funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures and expects to exceed the $10 million booking rate.
The main investors in the startup include angel investors, like former LinkedIn India CEO Nishat Rao, Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham, Helpshift CEO Abinash Tripathy, and Slideshare co-founder Jonathan Boutelle.
The main clients of the company include Roche, Fortune, and the United Nations. The company will also put the focus on the markets in the Middle East, Europe, United States, and Africa.
Vaibhav Jain, the co-founder, and CEO of Hubilo stated that several customers before the pandemic were enterprises and governments used the platform to organize large events. They also stopped hosting in-person events.
In February, major events canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, the revenue of Hubilo dropped to zero in February. With just 30 employees and reserves for three months, Jain stated that the company had to choose between shutting down or choosing an alternative model. Hubilo team created a virtual event platform in just a month. The company hosted the first virtual event in March and since that time, the company has never looked back.
Thus, Hubilo is now competing with several other platforms, like Hopin and Cvent. Jain stated that his company differentiates by giving organizers a chance to rebrand virtual spaces and focus on sponsorship opportunities. These include contests, virtual lounges, events feed, and data analytic features which include integration with Marketo, Hubspot, and Salesforce.
So many virtual events are going on that “webinar fatigue” and “Zoom fatigue” have now become catchphrases. Now, event organizers don’t only have to convince people to buy tickets but also keep them engaged during an event.
Hubilo “gamifies” the overall features of attending virtual events with features like its leaderboard. This enables organizers to assign different points to different events. Jain stated that the most used feature of Hubilo is the leaderboard.
