Hubilo raises $125m

Hubilo, a  global virtual events platform, announced that in a funding round led by Alkeon Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital, has raised $125m in Series B funding to further the development of the future of events and engagement on Hubilo’s platform. This brings the company’s total funding to $153m to date in less than 18 months.

The investment, one of the largest in the event technology category, signals the importance of many-to-many communications at a time when uncertainty about COVID-19 and its variants have resulted in cancelled conferences and delayed a return to traditional office environments.

The Series B funding will supercharge Hubilo’s continued international growth by allowing the company to develop new business functions, advance innovation of its platform, strengthen its product, engineering, and design teams in India, and go-to-market teams in APAC, EMEA, UK and the US.

Hubilo also plans to set up new sales offices in key regions to expand its operations and reach a greater volume of customers. In addition, Hubilo will also increase the overall employees’ count by 150 percent to support its rapid growth plans and to respond to the increased customer demand for virtual and hybrid events.

CEO and Founder, Vaibhav Jain, said: “The power to engage with massive audiences unlocks the potential for more diverse, geographically dispersed communities to come together for business and consumer events, remote workforces to stay engaged, and organisations to rethink the way they hire and train. The potential ahead of us with this investment is massive, but what we have learned over the last six years is that an intuitive platform is just table stakes. Our commitment to event organisers is that we will always provide a dedicated team to ensure flawless execution of every event. This is why so many event organisers make Hubilo their platform of choice.”

Hubilo was founded in 2015 to build event tech that increased attendee engagement in in-person events. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Hubilo saw revenues dwindling to zero, but rather than declare bankruptcy, they revamped their technology in 26 days and emerged as one of the leading architects of large-scale communications with the first version of their event platform.

Abhi Arun, Managing Partner at Alkeon Capital, remarked: “We believe strongly in the global distributed workforce being a megatrend that will impact all of us in the future. It is clear that the way we collaborate and connect will need to be rearchitected in order for any global player to succeed. In Hubilo, we see a powerful technology capable of connecting the offline and online worlds, a strong CEO, and an amazing market opportunity that gave us the confidence to invest.”

Now that the Delta variant has cemented the need to rethink every meeting and event strategy for the long term, companies realise that collaboration and communication technologies are essential for more than just events. While Hubilo started as an events technology platform, its solutions go beyond special occasions. It has successfully supported 10,000 events with more than two million attendees across more than 100 countries.

“Businesses spend over one trillion dollars of direct spending on events. In the last couple of years, 15-20% of the enterprise events budget has permanently moved to digital events. Hubilo is one of the fastest-growing and innovative platforms serving this market. I expect in the next few years that Hubilo will be broadly acknowledged as a market leader in the space,” said Guru Chahal, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Although the Asia Pacific region accounts for 25 percent of Hubilo’s business, Hubilo plans to capture more growth in the APAC region, including in Singapore.

Commenting on Singapore and Asia Pacific’s importance, Vaibhav Jain added: “Asia Pacific is a diverse region and home to economies that are leaders in digitalisation, including Singapore. Hubilo sees great value in having a technologically empowering platform that moulds connections despite the diversity and surpasses physical limitations, therefore helping businesses reach their audience and build opportunities in the long run.”

As the new era of events unfolds amongst the uncertainty, one thing remains steady: Hubilo’s innovation and commitment to foster human connection through the reimagination of events.