With some founders we meet, “the stars just perfectly align”, says our Partner Tom Wilson, and no more is that true than with our investment in Hopin, founded by Johnny Boufarhat. We’re over the moon for the team as they today announce their $6.5M seed round for their all-in-one online events platform that brings people closer by replicating the experience of offline events and makes them accessible at a global scale.
We led the pre-seed into Johnny and his vision for Hopin and the future of events in summer of 2019 and are thrilled to continue the journey and see him quickly go onto raise this highly sought after round with some of the world’s most impactful investors onboard with this round led by Accel and with participation from Northzone, WebSummit’s Amaranthine Fund and Slack Fund. The round is joined by high-profile angel investors including founder of Seedcamp-backed unicorn, UiPath, Daniel Dines, Supercell founder Ilkka Paananen, Intercom founder Des Traynor, GoCardless COO Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas and Miro founder Andrei Khusid.
The event industry is massive, with many millions of people attending events every year. However, in a time where travel has been heavily impacted by a global health emergency and seen growing concern about its environmental impact, there is a need for a sustainable solution for attending events, that doesn’t require you to travel.
Hopin is an online venue where organizers can create, host and manage live events for up to 100,000 attendees. With Hopin’s Event Builder, it takes only a few minutes to set up an event, such as a meetup, intra-company all-hands meetings, hackathon, or conference. Each event can be built as either online-only or layered on top of an existing offline event.
We love backing founders building products that genuinely change the way we interact and we have been actively using Hopin across the many Summits and workshops we run here at Seedcamp, allowing teams based all across the world to dial in and interact with attendees, and speakers, as if they were here in person.
The idea for Hopin was born out of Founder and CEO Johnny Boufarhat’s own frustrations of not finding the right tools to collaborate and network with larger groups remotely. Hopin’s own team is fully distributed and uses the platform to connect regularly. Boufarhat said,
“Connecting people is at the core of what we do at Hopin. We want to make sure everyone can experience the same great benefits of events — the connection you made bumping into someone in a breakout session, the potential customer you met at your booth or the awesome tip you got from a panel speaker – without having to physically attend.
Built for companies and global communities that host events, Hopin is opening up the online market for larger events, such as conferences, fairs and expos, as traditional web-conferencing and event management tools aren’t built to cater to larger groups, and usually cap attendees at 1,000.
Hopin is the only platform that replicates the experience of offline events and is designed to put attendees’ ability to connect at the heart of the platform. In addition to Hopin’s main stage segment with a speakers’ live stream, attendees can join sessions which create virtual roundtables with many-to-many video-conferencing capabilities and chat features; a networking area for attendees to meet one-on-one over a video stream; and booths for businesses to showcase their products to potential customers.
Since July last year, Hopin has been available by early access and seen incredible demand, with over 1,000 events hosted on the platform and a 10,000-strong waitlist of event organisers. With this investment, Hopin will continue to build out its platform, expand its team and quickly scale.
On the investment our Partner, Tom Wilson, comments:
“We were delighted to have the opportunity to lead Hopin’s pre-seed round and further participate alongside fantastic co-investors in this next round of funding. The market timing feels perfect for the Hopin all in one event platform and we’re really excited to be supporting the team on their journey.”
For more information and to sign up to the beta visit hopin.to
