Today we are proud to lead a $4.5M seed investment in Hubilo — a company based in SF & India, building the “system of record / enterprise intelligence hub” for the events industry. Hubilo is poised to become just as critical to the fast emerging events stack as Salesforce and Hubspot are to sales and marketing. In many ways, for us, this investment meets the perfect “VC Ikigai” :
- A massive $1T market getting disrupted overnight due to Covid-19
- An ambitious, passionate, fast moving founder who has spent his entire career deep in the sector
- Incredible 40X+ revenue ramp since Apr’20, almost all organic, and still accelerating
We, at Lightspeed, had been looking to invest in this space for quite a while. When we met Hubilo, their focus on the largest revenue pools in this category — branding, sponsorship and analytics — and their value prop for all stakeholders of this massive industry — the CMOs, event organizers, sponsors, and attendees — really resonated with us. We couldn’t be more excited to be their first institutional investor!
The Company
The journey of Hubilo and its incredible ramp from zero in March 2020 to what will soon be a $10M run-rate (and accelerating!) would be incomplete without mentioning where they came from. From 2015 until 2020, Hubilo was an offline events company well known for pulling off large corporate events globally, and already part of Capterra category top-20. In February 2020, when Covid-19 hit the world, Hubilo’s revenues dropped to zero.
With a cash runway of 3 months, what Hubilo did next will become startup lore in coming years. It pulled a Hail Mary.
Overnight, the company reduced non-essential costs by 60%. Employees took a 30% salary cut and the leadership team took a 70% cut for next 3 months. The team then decided to shut down their offline business completely and pivot into virtual events. Working through the weekends, they reduced sprint cycles from 2 weeks to 5 days, wrote blogs, landing pages, sales collateral, product decks & videos, and support articles while the tech team built the product.
Fast forward 20 days, the team had an MVP and a client who trusted Hubilo with their virtual event. The first virtual event was hosted on Hubilo on 16th March 2020. It was small — the client paid a paltry $150 — but the learnings were immense. Since then, the company has more than tripled in team size and has hosted events as large as 100K attendees, including with heads of state, global organizations such as the UN, AWS, Siemens and hundreds of enterprises and event management companies . In a sign of things to come post-pandemic, Hubilo also recently won the contract for the world’s largest event that recently went “hybrid” and is running both online and in-person: GITEX.
This is the sort of execution that we at Lightspeed get excited by. A rising tide raises all boats but only those who truly understand stakeholder pain points and out-execute everyone are going to dominate longer term.
The Market
The best way to understand the market for virtual events, its potential growth, and why Hubilo is the company to watch, comes down to two words: Déjà vu.
On October 27 1994, AT&T paid $30,000 for a banner ad that ran for three months on HotWired.com. By 2018, digital ad spending cracked the $100 billion barrier in the US alone. Companies buy digital ads for three reasons: they can target a specific audience, measure the results, and pay a lot less than they would for a printed version. Virtual events are very much the same. You can gather a group of people from across the world into one place. They can listen to speakers, interact with others, even play games and buy merchandise. And you can track every digital movement. More than 500,000 virtual events have been listed in the last three months and it’s happening for all the reasons we’ve seen before: you can target a specific audience, measure the results, and pay a lot less than you would for a physical event. In other words, we’ve seen this opportunity before.
Virtual events is not a new market. It’s a new circumstance.
Virtual events market will continue to grow, even when we get back on planes, because there is just too much money to be saved, and much more to be made, by hosting events online. On average, a typical Hubilo client spends $10,000 to host an online conference for attendees. If they wanted to hold the same event in the physical world, the starting price would be around $300K. A lot of them couldn’t even afford the arena, much less the catering bill. Will there still be in-person events? Sure. We’ll still go to CES in Las Vegas, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and so on. We like to gather. We’re social creatures. But the cost / benefit of hosting an online virtual event is too large to ignore; the TAM expansion opportunities for event organizers, sponsors, and attendees far too lucrative. We will never go back to physical events completely.
The Team & Vision
Which brings us to who wins. At Lightspeed, our thesis has always been that being a “virtual events hosting software” is not enough. This playbook will get commoditized fast. While other platforms have focused on solving for emerging long-tail communities, or attendee experiences to increase attendance and ticket sales, our north star has been to follow the money.
And the money is not in ticket sales; it is in branding, sponsorships, and analytics.
We had been looking for a team to back in this space for a long time when we met the Hubilo team. This was a battle-hardened group of founders with deep experiences (and scars) from running an offline events business for global clients in the past. They had been winning clients away from other larger players already. However, it was their incredible insights into the generations old events market and a strong intuition on customers’ and key stakeholders’ needs that really blew us away. When we heard Hubilo’s CEO, Vaibhav Jain, say “branding gets organizers in the door but analytics make them stay”, we knew we had to back this team.
Much like a movie theatre, event organizers make very little profit on ticket sales. They make the majority of it on branding: revenue from sponsors who pay for a presence. Hubilo’s platform allows deep customization for sponsors to brand themselves exactly as they want: from custom URLs to fully customizable skins, and much more. Organizers and sponsors love it. The other part of Hubilo’s winning strategy is its deep analytics. A CMO might feel good about participating at CES but will she ever know who visited her booth, what was this visitor looking for and which other competitors is she meeting? Hubilo can do all that and more. As for attendees, imagine if an AI algorithm could uncover the most important people with whom to network, instead of relying on chance? Or pre-load a personalized offer to a “VIP attendee” just as she enters a virtual booth to maximize engagement or trigger a sale?
Being at the center of this economic and data flow will be a highly lucrative business. What Hubilo is building fits right into our thesis. On one end, Hubilo captures an incredible amount of event-related intelligence through features such as gamified leaderboards, networking sessions, and lead-gen. On the other end, Hubilo connects this data to enterprise backends to truly become the “system of record” for events for enterprises. While this early ride from zero to ~$10M run rate has been incredible, this team is just getting started and gearing up for massive growth in 2021. We are very excited and fortunate to go on this journey with Hubilo as it becomes as critical to events as Salesforce is for sales and HubSpot for marketing.
~ Hemant, Dev and the Lightspeed team
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