London-based start-up Hopin announced that it has raised a $40 million Series A.

WHO: Founded in 2019, Hopin offers an all-in-one live online events platform designed to connect distributed communities. The company’s platform differs from other videoconferencing services in that it’s designed from the ground up to provide support for conferences, including the management of stages, networking, breakout sessions, sponsors, tickets, and analytics.

WHY: The new funding will go to scale up its platform to meet soaring demand driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS: “The global vision for Hopin is to be the best online venue for any event,” Hopin founder and Chief Executive Officer Johnny Boufarhat said in a statement. “We are building a solution to what has been missing for so long: a platform people can use to build online events that match the dynamism of an interactive, in-person experience.”

“Hopin is a venue,” Boufarhat told TechCrunch in an interview, meaning that its customers need support to make sure things go well when they use the software. If a piece of business technology hiccups for a few minutes, Boufarhat explained, citing CRM as an example, it’s not the end of the world. If a Hopin instance has issues, he explained, 1,000 people could be impacted, causing them to judge both the hosting group and his company.

DETAILS:

• Hopin raised a $40 million Series A led by IVP with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Accel, Northzone, Seedcamp, and Slack Fund.
• Including the new funding, Hopin has raised $46.4 million to date.
• The round comes after the business raised a $6.5 million round in February of this year. At the time of this round, the company was seeing revenue scale roughly along with expenses, allowing it to be “nearly profitable” during the period.
• The company currently has 50,000 customers on its waiting list, with more than 1,000 organizations joining each day.