The report of Hopin acquires streaming platform StreamYard for $250 Million hit the news earlier this year. On January 7th, 2021, it was announced that the 18-month-old company with the worth of $2.1 billion had successfully acquired StreamYard, making it the second virtual event companies acquisition deal sealed by this company in the span of three weeks, right after taking over Topi in the prior month.
About StreamYard
StreamYard is a company established in 2018 in Tualantin, Oregon, by Dan Briggs and Geige Vandentop. It provides online-based alternatives that operate in various internet browsers to support entertainers, business, nonprofit organization, hobbyists, and anyone else who want to create exciting real-time events for the audiences, and broadcast them simultaneously on different social platforms such as Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
This online event platform service lets creators to decorate their lives as well, by allowing to use backgrounds, overlays, themes, logos, color schemes, and GIFs. The creators can easily invite up to ten guests during the live events, display viewers’ comments on-screen, and increase sales and conversion by adding interaction via call-to-actions.
This virtual conference company came to realization that the production of live streaming required knowledge about complicated technology and costly hardware – which makes a great barrier for a lot of business to reach and build connection with wider audience. In order to provide solution for this problem, it developed streaming virtual event app with powerful yet user-friendly features to create quality contents.
The ‘StreamYard’ founders had successfully achieved almost $10 million revenue from this online conference platform in 2020. It led to employment of 19 staffs and nearly $30 million of annual revenue by the end of the year. Currently, more than 100,000 paid users are using this service, with an average growth of 10,000 additional paid users per month.
Hopin Acquires Streaming Platform StreamYard for $250 Million – What the Acquisition Means
Since it was launched on the second month of 2020, Hopin constantly experiences fast-paced growth and high demand. Previously, there were 1,800 organizations and 5,000 users that enjoy the virtual events hosting service – yet the numbers have been skyrocketed to 100,000 organizations and 5 million users. In a year, this company grows from employing 8 persons to almost 300 employees in 38 countries.
Even though Hopin has had its own built-in virtual meeting platforms, it started to allow the users to use 3rd party externalizations such as Vimeo, YouTube, Wistia, and StreamYard. The latter proved to be the most used stream tool, according to the company. It further claimed that their teams themselves also use the service and recommended it to make host’s events become more engaging and professional.
After it has been sealed that Hopin acquires streaming platform StreamYard for $250 million, the service will replace the default Hopin’s service for all live hostings, with completion of integration expected to take place in 2021’s first half.
During its 2.5 years of existence, StreamYard app company has yet to gained any external investments and only has a total of 19 staffs. That being said, at the end of 2020, this conference platform was able to achieve over $30 million of annual recurring revenues and attracted more than 100,000 premium customers, which probably why it was considered as a considerable contender for the acquisition.