The pandemic has wreaked havoc on pretty much every sector, including live events like conferences. As stay-at-home orders and other public-health measures continue to curtail large, in-person gatherings, conferences have been forced to either cancel or shift online, meaning the industry has had to evolve quickly.
On Wednesday, Bizzabo, an NYC-based startup that aims to help usher in this evolution, announced it closed on a $138 million Series E round. The company plans to use this fresh funding to triple its engineering, product and experience teams, with the ultimate goal of being the go-to platform for putting on “hybrid” live events.
Bizzabo’s all-in-one event software offers everything an event coordinator might need when putting on a virtual conference, from features that register and collect payments from attendees, to chat rooms that allow exhibitors and sponsors to better communicate with their audience and each other. The idea is to help companies manage and scale their virtual events without compromising on quality.
Founded in 2011, Bizzabo has been in this space for a while. However, demand for its product has been surging in the last year. The company says its revenue has grown by more than 100 percent, with overall usage up 150X. And co-founder and CEO Eran Ben-Shushan expects even more growth in the future as events enter into a new kind of “hybrid” space that has both live and virtual elements.
“The future of professional events isn’t virtual-only,” Ben-Shushan said in a statement. “Our data shows very clearly that, while virtual events have major benefits, attendees and businesses want to get back to live events. To stay relevant, marketers and event organizers will need to implement a hybrid strategy that blends together the best parts of virtual and in-person experiences.”
Before this can happen though, virtual events need to be better at replicating the things that make live events so special, particularly networking opportunities and more personalized experiences. Bizzabo plans to use this most recent funding to build software that makes that happen.
“The hybrid technology of tomorrow will need to do much more than just combine a virtual platform and an in-person platform. It will need to be built from the ground up with a hybrid approach in mind,” Ben-Shushan said in a recent blog post outlining Bizzabo’s growth plan. “Now that events lean on technology to a far greater extent, the importance of building seamless, simple, reliable, joyful products, services and — ultimately — experiences is key.”
This latest round of funding was led by Insight Partners and will also be used to open two new offices and hire 100 new employees globally in the first half of 2021.
