SUMMARY
Sequoia Capital India led the Series A round
The company plans to accelerate tech development and hiring
The company counts Accel India, Venture Highway and others as its investors
Bengaluru-based virtual events platform Airmeet has raised $12 Mn in Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital India. Existing investors Accel India, Venture Highway and Global Founders Capital (GFC) also participated in the round, along with Gokul Rajaram (Caviar Lead at Doordash).
Airmeet plans to use this funding to accelerate technology development and grow its 60 member team spread across six countries to a 100 member team. A part of the fund will also be used to expand its customer base globally.
Earlier in March, the company had raised $3 Mn in a funding round led by Accel India. VentureHighway, Berlin-based Global Founders Capital, AngelList, LetsVenture, and Sequoia Scout also participated in the round.
Besides VCs, angel investors such as Unacademy cofounder Gaurav Munjal, redBus cofounder Phanindra Sama, Livspace cofounder Ramakant Sharma, CommonFloor cofounder Sumit Jain, Kawa Space founder Krish Nair, and Telenor Health founder Sajid Rahman also participated in the round.
Airmeet is an online meeting and event hosting platform, where instead of simply broadcasting the event, participants can connect with other event attendees for one-to-one and one-to-many online interactions. The remote-first startups claims to be an all-in-one platform that helps its users to host, discover, and attend remote events like professional meetups and conferences
It offers virtual tables, networking lounges, backstage, stage, claps and audience reactions to participants in order to recreate the live atmosphere online. It was founded in 2019 by Lalit Mangal, Vinay Kumar Jasti, and Manoj Kumar Singh. Mangal was one of the founders of CommonFloor, while Jasti and Singh were in the leadership team at the proptech startup.
The company claims to have grown nearly 2,000% over the last quarter organically, gaining one customer every hour. As of July 2020, the company had hosted 10K events on its platforms, and aims to power 1K events per day in the coming year.
“Our mission is to make virtual events so effective and engaging that it should appear archaic to organise an on-ground event. We are already seeing an irreversible behaviour change among event organisers and an exponential rise in, what we call, ‘Digitally native events,” Mangal said.
According to a 2019 report by MarketWatch, the global online meeting software market is estimated to reach $6.23 Bn by 2024, registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.1% during the forecast period from 2019 to 2024. Among the online meeting platforms, Airmeet competes with the likes of INXPO, Zoho Meeting, Skype, BigMarker, among others.
