Airmeet, a startup that lets users and businesses conduct virtual summits, meetups, and workshops, has raised $35 million funding from a clutch of investors including Prosus Ventures, Sistema Asia Fund, RingCentral Ventures, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, DG Daiwa Ventures, and Nexxus Global.
Existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Accel India also participated in the funding round.
Airmeet CEO Lalit Mangal told Moneycontrol that the proceeds raised will be used to invest heavily in research and development and scaling its go-to-market function. They will also focus on improving the company's brand awareness through strategic activities that will bring more visibility to its products globally.
Started by Mangal, Manoj Singh, and Vinay Kumar Jaasti in 2019, Airmeet currently offers two products - Social Webinars and Virtual Conferences through multiple pricing plans. These products support a range of multi-format events such as webinars, hybrid conferences, trade shows, and workshops.
The startup claims to have enabled more than 120,000 event organisations to stream 150 million minutes of video airtime across the world.
"We stand apart from the competition when it comes to connections-focused or meetings-focused events like career fairs and trade fairs or networking-oriented events. In these events, while the content agenda is important, it is also important to discover other people and meet" Mangal said.
Mangal said they started focusing on monetisation in 2021 after both their event experiences came out of beta and they have witnessed sizable revenue growth in the past year. Going forward, Airmeet plans to build a large portfolio of new experiences on the platform, he said.
“The global market for virtual events has grown to become a $110B opportunity aided by the new realities of work, networking, and marketing. Airmeet with their product delivering a near offline-equivalent conference experience is well placed to tap into this major paradigm shift in the global conferencing market” said Sumit Jain, Senior Partner at Sistema Asia Fund.
Airmeet is serving more than 1,000 customers and aims to expand it to 15,000 customers by the end of this year, he said. Among the startup's key customers include Flipkart, ViacomCBS, University College London, Minnesota State University, Fifth Element Group, and Unifrog Education.
India currently accounts for about 15% of the company's revenues, while the majority comes from North America and Europe, Mangal said.
"This pandemic has shifted the way companies engage with various stakeholders (customers, employees, etc.) to digital given the efficiency and immersive experience associated with it. We've been a partner to Airmeet for 18+ months now and are impressed with the team's product focus, relentless execution, and immense customer love for the product," said Abhishek Mohan, Principal, Sequoia India.
Other players in this space include Hubilo that landed $125 million financing led by Alkeon Capital in October last year and Zuddl that raised $13.3 million funding led by Alpha Wave Incubation in January.
Posted by Money Control on Feb 8 | https://bit.ly/38kjGvc
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