The Covid-19 pandemic led to a lot of restrictions which meant people could not travel or hold meetings physically. This led to a lot of companies adopting virtual events. Now that most restrictions have been removed, companies such as Hubilo, an event management firm will attempt to bring back their focus on organizing events physically instead of virtually.
Hubilo was founded by Vaibhav Jain, Mayank Agarwal, and John Peter in the year 2015 and is based out of San Fransisco. It raised an initial funding of $150 million between 2020 to 2021. In the second round of funding, they raised a total of $23.5 million from Balderton Capital and Lightspeed Ventures. Further in 2021 Hubilo received an infusion of $125 million from Alkeon Capital in a Series B round of funding.
During the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 Hubilo had exponentially increased their recruitment process as they had witnessed a surge in demand for virtual events. Hubilo is a startup that provides a platform to consumers to host conferences and events virtually. A total of 115 employees were laid off which amounts to 35% of its workforce. The company stated that they lay off were part of a workforce restructuring process.
A member of Hubilo told Moneycontrol that “The company had to take this difficult decision as we are completely restructuring due to the global macroeconomic pressures. Around 115 employees are affected in this.” Employees that were laid off received monetary compensation along with support for placements in order to see to it that the laid-off employees managed to procure alternate employment. Companies that provided a platform that gave access to people the ability to hold virtual meetings did very well during the pandemic. However, the number of affected as cases started to lower and people have slowly started going outside again. This has seen platforms like Hubilo and zooms see a fall in revenue in 2021 as compared to 2020.
