Hopin, a London-based startup developing virtual events technology, raises $40M Series A led by IVP with Salesforce Ventures and others participating
This morning Hopin, a London-based startup building virtual events technology, announced that it has raised a $40 million Series A led by IVP.
Context & Ripple Effects
This $40M round is the opening move in what became the fastest valuation climb in the corpus's coverage of any company: within five months Hopin followed it with a $125M Series B co-led by IVP and Tiger Global at a $2B+ valuation, then a reported push for a ~$400M Series C that landed as $400M at $5.65B, and by August 2021 $450M at $7.75B.
IVP's presence at both the Series A and Series B marks it as the conviction backer from the start, while Salesforce Ventures' participation ties the platform into the enterprise software orbit its conference-hosting customers already inhabit. The FT's later profile frames the whole arc as riding the pandemic-led videoconferencing wave — six acquisitions in a year on top of the fundraising.
First-order effects
- Hopin gains the capital to scale its virtual-events platform precisely when lockdowns force conference hosts to move gatherings online, converting a forced market shift into paying demand.
- IVP doubles its exposure early — leading both this round and the subsequent Series B — while Salesforce Ventures' check positions Hopin adjacent to enterprise CRM workflows.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent events and conferencing vendors face a well-funded London challenger bundling networking, expo, and stage features into one platform, pressuring them to accelerate their own virtual offerings or cede the category.
- The pace of Hopin's rounds — $2B+ to $5.65B to $7.75B in under a year — pulls competing capital toward European virtual-events startups and inflates the price of any acquisition targets in the space, feeding Hopin's own six-deal M&A run.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, pandemic-era demand spikes can compress a decade of startup maturation into months — but the FT's framing of Hopin as riding a videoconferencing wave leaves open how much of the $7.75B value survives once in-person events return, making this the canonical case study in whether lockdown-born platforms are durable businesses or cyclical ones.
- For London, Hopin's trajectory strengthens the city's case as Europe's leading startup hub, complementing Dealroom's finding that it reclaimed the top spot from Paris and ranks fourth globally.
The trend: Virtual events became the fastest-inflating category of the pandemic capital cycle, with investor conviction outrunning the durability question that looms over every lockdown-born platform.