Fast-growing global virtual events platform Hubilo has announced that in a funding round led by Alkeon Capital and including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital, it has raised £92m ($125.35m) in Series B funding. This investment demonstrates the growing attractiveness of the event technology sector and brings Hubilo’s total funding to £113m in less than 18 months.
The investment, one of the largest in the event technology category, signals the revolution in ways by which people connect, engage and share experiences.
Hubilo believes the new funding will supercharge its 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 the US, UK, EMEA, and APAC.
Hubilo’s CEO Vaibhav Jain tells EW he expects the company to increase its overall staff total by 150%.
“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,” said Jain, who added that, “what we’ve 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 event 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 and Jain said that when the pandemic hit in 2020, the company reworked its technology in 26 days to produce the first version of the Hubilo event platform. Now the company works with some of the globe’s largest brands such as Blackboard, Walmart, United Nations, Roche Pharma and Maersk Shipping.
“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,” said Abhi Arun, managing partner at Alkeon Capital. “In Hubilo, we saw 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.”
To date, Hubilo has supported over 10,000 events with more than two million attendees across more than 100 countries.
“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.
Look out for our exclusive interview with Hubilo CEO Vaibhav Jain in the next print edition of EW.
