German-Swiss virtual events platform Veertly raises €1.9 million

All-in-one platform for hybrid and online events and digital collaboration Veertly has raised €1.9 million in a seed round. The startup bills itself as the “most flexible in the market” and is designed specifically to host virtual and hybrid events. Skipping the pre-seed round, Veertly has been bootstrapped for the past 1.5 years, and will use the seed funding to move the needle in the sales and marketing departments, as well as continue product innovations.

Founded in October of last year, Veertly founders Joao Aguiam, Alexander Spahn, and Joschka Finkbeiner met at a blockchain hackathon. While the trio took home top honours, they decided to turn down the prize money, opting in favour of their shared vision: a virtual collaboration platform.

A hefty market to enter, at a saturated time indeed, this author would be remiss if the elephant in the room wasn’t addressed. Namely that of juggernauts Hopin, its $1 billion in funding, and its seemingly unending series of acquisitions, and that “other” virtual collaboration platform, Zoom, who’ve been making forays into the event space.

Perhaps where the company aims to start apart is in its wide range of third-party tools integrations, a factor that provides, “unlimited opportunities for new collaboration experiences,” or a white label offer that allows the technology to remain invisible in the background.

Veertly has powered projects for clients including Personio, the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), the Impact Hub, and ETH Zurich, and been used to host the Mercedes Benz Social Media Night, as well as the Mautic World Conference.

And it’s not just organisations that are embracing Veertly, but events hosts as well. Friend of the show and seasoned World Economic Forum, SXSW, and Web Summit host Dan Ram commented, “As beautiful, inspiring, and important personal meetings and interactions at events are - I believe that the future of many events will be hybrid, because often virtual formats are simply less complicated. That's why we need strong platforms like Veertly that enable efficient yet motivating and interactive participation for guests, organizers and even presenters like me."

Veertly’s seed round was championed by coparion, and Avaloq co-founder Ronald Straessler, along with a number of angel investors including Hartmut Carl, CEO of event and trade fair technology provider Carl Group, and Stephan Thalmann, Sebastian Amme and Peter Kessel.