People

Is Hopin this year’s breakout tech startup? Investors seem to think so.

The online platform for events is now worth over $2 billion after growing to over 3.5 million users.

Johnny Boufarhat

"This could be the fastest company ever to grow if we execute correctly," says Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat.

Photo: Hopin

To Hopin founder and CEO Johnny Boufarhat, using Zoom is the equivalent of having an event in a WeWork conference room. His platform, Hopin, wants to be the entire event venue downstairs.

"I would say any event you have over 20 people, that's when you should use Hopin," Boufarhat said. "Because after 20 people on meeting software, it becomes a little bit harder to manage. I think our biggest competitor is webinars, because that's what the previous conception of events were."

Investors and event organizers are starting to realize the difference, too. Since February, Hopin says it's grown from 5,000 registered users to over 3.5 million. The number of event organizers has also jumped from 1,800 to 50,000. Boufarhat told Protocol that the company is on pace for $20 million in ARR and is profitable.

The spike in growth led to investor Semil Shah calling Hopin the "breakout tech company of 2020," a moniker that Boufarhat agreed with before joking that he hopes it doesn't set it up to become the flop of 2021. Extra cash will probably help prevent that. On Tuesday, the company plans to announce a new $125 million series B funding round led by existing investor IVP and new investor Tiger Global. Other firms, including Coatue, DFJ Growth and Accel, are also pitching in.

The fundraise pushes Hopin's valuation to $2.125 billion — a massive leap for a company that had only raised its seed round last year, but not entirely unexpected for the category.

Videoconferencing startups have proliferated in the pandemic as everything from church services to work conferences have moved online. And while Zoom has had its own crazy growth and has become synonymous with video calls, startups are still finding opportunities to build their own specialized platforms. There are other startups, like Airmeet, which are also specializing in online events. Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller is building a new platform designed for college-level online education. Meanwhile, there's a Zoom for developers, Zoom for parties, or Zoom but less boring.

Boufarhat deflects the Zoom analogies because he sees it as an entirely different use case. He had actually started working on Hopin — before the pandemic — as a way to build better online events. After graduating from university, Boufarhat traveled in Asia but came home sick and remained relatively isolated for a few years while he recovered. He started trying online events, but nothing felt like it could replace being there in person.

"I wanted to attend an event just like I had in real life," he said. "So I started creating a video platform that allows you to do that."

Instead of feeling like a webinar, Hopin lets users network with each other and pair people up for one-on-one conversations. There are sessions where people can gather at virtual roundtables, and then also stages (and importantly, backstages for speakers) for keynotes. There's even a virtual expo while in-person expo halls are closed.

Hopin offers stages, and even backstages, for event speakers. Image: Hopin

Boufarhat released an early version of Hopin and quickly realized there was a lot of built-in virality. In the earliest days, an average of 7% of users wound up becoming event organizers. Today, it stands closer to 3%, but the virality has been what's quietly driving its growth so far, he said.

While he originally intended to bootstrap, Boufarhat decided to go out and raise a small seed round last fall. "We just needed to have an incredible pace," he said. "This could be the fastest company ever to grow if we execute correctly, and that's a massive 'if' because I've never done something like this before."

He was able to raise a series A from early traction alone in February, but had originally planned to launch Hopin as a platform in September. And then coronavirus happened, so Hopin moved up the launch. Now, the team has grown from eight employees to over 200 in the last eight months, he said, and Boufarhat plans to put Hopin's new funding to work to hire more.

The startup is also going to take a run at platforms like Eventbrite by having an "Explore" feature where people can find online events that might interest them. In the next week on Hopin, there will be a summit for preschools, a Canadian craft fair and a telethon. Already, some of Boufarhat's favorite events on Hopin this year were conferences like TechCrunch Disrupt and a comedy show called "Smart Funny & Black."

The question for Hopin — and all the startups building for our virtual-first world — is what happens when the pandemic is over. Already, "stay at home stocks" like Peloton, Roku and Zoom fell Monday after the announcement of COVID-19 vaccine progress, signaling slight reticence (at least in the public markets) that those companies can maintain their staying power when this is done.

Boufarhat isn't troubled by it at all, though. He thinks some events, like concerts, will return to in-person, but he's betting on a hybrid future where most events happen online with an occasional real-world component, too.

"Organizers get more value from them online," Boufarhat said. "Not everybody likes traveling across the world for business. It's not great for the environment, it's not as accessible. I think that if they do move offline, they'll be hybrid."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins