At The Hustle, we are very careful to ration our use of the “Larry Bird towel wave” GIF. For us to break out Larry Legend, something truly momentous has to happen.
Well, today is the day: Hopin — the European online events startup — just closed its 3rd funding round in 2020 and is valued at $2.1B.
More importantly for us, its head of marketing is former Trends contributor Dave Schools. #CONGRATS
Per TechCrunch, the number of monthly attendees of events on the platform has skyrocketed from 16k in March to 3.5m+ today.
Annual recurring revenue has also exploded from $0 to $20m.
With $171m of funding in hand, Hopin looks to expand from 215 to 800+ employees over the next year.
Hopin’s CEO Johnny Boufarhat says his original vision was for hybrid events, which TechCrunch takes to mean “allowing IRL events to merge with online experiences.”
One bull is investor Samil Shah. In previous years, he’s anointed “breakout startups”: Stripe in 2012, Snap in 2013, Slack in 2014, and Coinbase in 2017.
Guess who Shah’s 2020 breakout startup is (unfortunately for his portfolio, he has “no connection” to Hopin).
Now, we’re not saying that Hopin is Trends’ first official unicorn… what we are saying is that you need to come join our awesome community.
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(In light of this news, we created a special $100 off Trends discount code: unicorn. If 10m of you use the code here, we’ll have given away a unicorn in value — LOL.)