As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, virtual corporate events have, for better or worse, become a necessity. For the most part, these events are pretty awkward — full of shared PowerPoint presentations and Brady Bunch-esque views of everyone on the call.
However, a wave of startups aiming to redefine the virtual events experience have begun cropping up. One such startup is Touchcast, which combines AI and “mixed reality” to produce lifelike virtual conferences for major brands like Bloomberg, Pfizer and J.P. Morgan.
The NYC-based company announced Wednesday that it closed on a $55 million Series A round led by strategic investor Accenture Ventures, the investment arm of the consultancy giant. Alexander Capital Ventures, Saatchi Invest, billionaire businessman Ronald Lauder and other unnamed investors also participated.
With Touchcast, event speakers still use basic video conferencing platforms like Zoom, but then Touchcast takes those video feeds, trims out the background, and places them in virtual “venues” so they appear to be onstage at an actual conference. Throughout the event, the company’s platform offers various tools audience members can use to interact with each other and the speakers, including reaction buttons, polls and question prompts. The platform also produces real-time language translations, transcriptions of speeches and summaries of their key points for later review.
The goal of Touchcast, according to the company, is to “remove barriers of language, time and distance” in “gorgeous virtual spaces,” which has become increasingly important amid the pandemic.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically accelerated the need to reimagine the way we meet, connect and collaborate with each other,” founder and CEO Edo Segal said in a statement. “Touchcast harnesses the power of AI and mixed-reality to deliver a virtual event platform that redefines how knowledge is created and shared across space and time, providing an unparalleled immersive and interactive experience.”
Segal told TechCrunch that Touchcast has been “overrun by demand” in the wake of the pandemic, so the company plans to use this fresh funding to further scale its platform. He also told Built In via email that the company is “growing the team across all functions, including sales, marketing and operations.” And it appears Touchcast has several open tech positions available now.
Touchcast isn’t the only company attempting to redefine what virtual events can look like. Bizzabo, another NYC startup with a similar mission, raised a hefty $138 million Series E in December, and tech giant Microsoft partnered with the NBA to bring fans to games virtually.
Looking ahead, a recent report out of Grand View Research cited by Touchcast predicts that the virtual events space will be worth more than $400 billion by 2027, indicating that they aren’t likely to fall out of fashion anytime soon, even when in-person events are safe to attend again. So these events need to be high quality. This, says Accenture Ventures’ managing director Tom Lounibos, is why the investment firm decided to back the startup.
“For organizations to harness the power of virtual experiences to deliver business impact, the pandemic has shown that quality interactions and insights are needed. Our investment in Touchcast demonstrates our commitment to identifying the latest technologies that help address our clients’ critical business needs,” Lounibos said in a statement. “Digital disruption, distributed workforces, and customer experiences are the driving forces behind the need for companies to transform how they do business and move forward the future of work.”
