News

March 4, 2021

Hopin almost triples valuation to $5.65bn just one year after launch

The fastest-growing startup in Europe has raised $400m and almost tripled its valuation in four months.


Amy Lewin

3 min read

Johnny Boufarhat, founder of Hopin

Not content with being the fastest-growing startup in Europe (or, perhaps, the world), virtual events platform Hopin has raised a $400m Series C round from the gods of US VC, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst — at a stonking $5.65bn valuation. 

IVP, Coatue, DFJ Growth, Northzone, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global also participated. 

The raise comes just four months after its $125m Series B round (when it hit a $2.1bn valuation) and one year since launch. Its latest valuation makes Hopin one of the most valuable startups in Europe — and more valuable than Wise (TransferWise), Bolt and N26.

Hopin needs the capital because it is hiring, acquiring and onboarding customers like mad. Since November, it has added 30k customers including American Express, The Financial Times and Hewlett Packard, bringing the total number of organisations it has worked with to more than 85k. 

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The fully remote company now has more than 400 employees (up from 23 in April 2020) and is announcing several new senior hires. It has also acquired two other businesses — mobile app development company Topi (for an undisclosed amount) and video streaming company StreamYard (for $250m) — and says it will continue scoping out opportunities to develop its platform technologies in areas such as video and mobile.

If Hopin keeps growing at the current rate, it will hit $100m annual recurring revenue within a year — the “gold standard” for software investing, according to Salesforce Ventures’ Alex Kayyal. 

But questions still remain: can Hopin keep growing at this rate, especially as the pandemic wanes? Will any serious competitors muscle in? And will its team withstand hypergrowth?

New hires

Hopin’s new head of remote, Jonathan Killeen, and VP of people, Sarah Manning, will have a big role to play when it comes to looking after the team through hypergrowth.

Hopin’s founder Johnny Boufarhat is an evangelist of the benefits of building a fully remote team. Being able to hire somebody from anywhere in the world is a huge advantage, he thinks, especially when you need those people as soon as humanly possible.

“Being remote allows you to do more things with more people; there’s a ton of talent across the world,” Boufarhat, who is based in London, told Sifted at Hopin’s last fundraise. “If someone has a three month notice period, that’s a huge problem for us — that’s like they’ll join in three years from now. [Being remote] we can hire from the US, where sometimes people have no notice period, and a lot of the time people are hired as contractors. Remote is a huge advantage.”

Killeen, who joins Hopin from Dropbox, will be in charge of developing internal initiatives and systems to support Hopin’s workforce, while working to boost productivity and engagement. Manning, who has previously worked at Zendesk and BT, will oversee HR. 

Hopin’s other big hire is Anthony Kennada, who is joining as chief marketing officer. He was most recently CMO at customer communication company Front. 

The board

As part of this round, Andreessen Horowitz’s new general partner Sriram Krishnan, who has previously led product teams at Twitter, Snap and Facebook, will join Hopin’s board. 

There's also California-based IVP partner Jules Maltz, London-based Accel partner Sonali De Rycker, Hopin’s chief business officer Armando Mann and founder Boufarhat.  

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Amy Lewin

Amy Lewin is Sifted’s editor and cohost of Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast , and writes Up Round, a weekly newsletter on VC. Follow her on X and LinkedIn