London's Hopin gets £5 million from Accel to expand online events platform for remote attendees

London's Hopin gets £5 million from Accel to expand online events platform for remote attendees

Hopin, a London-based remote live online events company, has raised £5 million in seed funding led by global venture capital firm Accel, with participation from Northzone, Seedcamp, Web Summit’s Amaranthine Fund and Slack Fund.

Using Hopin’s platform, organisers can create, host and manage live events for up to 100,000 attendees. Each event can be built as either online-only or layered on top of an existing offline event, which can be recreated in a virtual space.

“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,” said founder and CEO, Johnny Boufarhat.

In addition to a "main stage" element with a speakers’ live stream, online attendees can attend virtual roundtables, visit digital product demo booths, and enter a networking area to video stream with others one-on-one/

“Hopin is the only platform that can truly replicate an offline event online, no matter the size. It is the answer for the enterprise with a distributed workforce that needs to plan an internal offsite, as well as the event organiser that needs to coordinate a conference with stages, workshops and networking,” said Luciana Lixandru, who led the investment for Accel and will be joining the board.

Since last summer, Hopin has been available only by early access, hosting about 1,000 events and accumulating a wait list of 10,000 event organisers. With the seed funding, the startup plans to build out the platform, expand its team, and scale quickly.

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