The news was revealed on June 9, 2021, that LinkedIn invests in virtual platform Hopin. The deal is a result of secondary round of Series C funding by the market-leading online event platform company, with total investment of $50 million and raise the company’s valuation to $5.65 billion.
About LinkedIn and Hopin
Then the pandemic started to break during the end 2019 to early 2020, Hopin was in the right time and the right place. The company was freshly established in London and grown rapidly as a lot of event organizers were looking for virtual meeting platforms to compensate for cancelled in-person event.
The online online conference platform provider allows the users to create a similar physical event experience, by offering various tools such as networking sidebars and virtual talks. It also recently acquired StreamYard, a video streaming service provider, and developed Topi, a mobile app back in February.
Apparently, the virtual conference doesn’t take a lot of time to fill its pocket. In June, it succeeded to raise $40 million worth of investment, followed by $125 million gained funding in November. Earlier this year, it obtained $400 million. What used to be a six-employee company at the start of 2020 has become a company with 550 staffs. The conference platform company also raked more than 95,000 users and millions of attendees monthly, according to the revealed data by the company.
On the other hand, LinkedIn has been found to invest actively in various software companies. It provides funding to at least three startups on 2021 only. The most recent investment would be $88 million founding to Piano in May, an analytic start-up company.
The last prominent investment made by this company before it was acquired in 2016 by Microsoft, was in 2014. It was providing finance supports to open-source software development company, Apache Kafka, that resulted in jointed forces company called Confluent. Confluent had $24 million valuation at that time, and yet now it plans to go public with over $300 million yearly revenue and $4.5 billion valuation in 2020.
What May Come from the Investment Deal?
There are several possible scenarios that can come up from the event of LinkedIn Invests in Virtual Platform Hopin:
- Extensive integration of community and networking features from both companies.
- Increased integration of exclusive virtual event livestream by using Streamyard.
- Strategic plans to make virtual events feature to be more solid.
All of the provided scenarios above only serve as general picture of possibilities that can happen, considering the resources owned by both companies. Even though it is unlikely that the investor to close the door for other virtual event companies entirely, the integration between both will still present significant impacts. Additionally, it may also affect the pricing and feature accessibility, which no doubt would raise more debate in the future.
For now, what’s clear is that the invested virtual event app company is once again proving and increasing its power. This deal is expected to be followed by other investment deals in the near future.