Asia-focused events platform Airmeet raises $12m

Redpoint Ventures, Accel Partners, Venture Highway, and Global Founders Capital, a German VC firm, also participated. It follows a $3 million seed round earlier this year led by Accel and featuring incubator platform AngelList India.

Airmeet’s key offering is marketed as a ballroom-style “social lounge” with freely accessible virtual tables for serendipitous encounters and a speed networking lobby where participants can spontaneously meet and make new connections in 1-5 minute increments.

The platform is not restricted to traditional, large-scale conferences, but can accommodate more intimate ice-breakers and workshops, as well as events such as hackathons or cultural festivals. “Our mission is to make virtual events so effective and engaging that it should appear archaic to organize an on-ground event,” Lalit Mangal, a co-founder of Airmeet, said in a statement.

The company claims to have grown about 2,000% during the last quarter, purely through word of mouth and social media. This is said to be the equivalent of gaining one new customer per hour. As of July, the platform had hosted more than 10,000 events. In the coming year, Airmeet aims to facilitate more than 1,000 events per day.

"COVID-19 has accelerated a permanent behavioral shift across many industries,” Abhishek Mohan, a vice president at Sequoia India, added. “With digitization of largely traditional spaces leapfrogging by years, the $800 billion-plus global offline events space is up for grabs. There is massive potential for players who drive the industry’s transition towards online-events.”

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Technology
• Media
• Early-stage
• Support services
• India
• Sequoia Capital
• Accel Partners
• TMT