Virtual events platform startup Hopin Ltd. said today it has raised $40 million in new funding to scale up its platform to meet soaring demand driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Series A round was led by IVP and included Salesforce Ventures, Accel, Northzone, Seedcamp and Slack Fund.

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.

In the year after its founding, Hopin has seen nearly 1 million users attending events hosted by more than 16,000 organizations. Hosted events included large-scale tech events, major international conference and even weddings. The company currently has 50,000 customers on its waist with more than 1,000 organizations joining each day.

“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. ”

Timing is everything in business and though no one could have foreseen the disruption caused by COVID-19, Hopin is well-placed to offer services as companies continue to abandon traditional in-person conferences for online-only events. Hopin is currently producing events for major organizations, including the United Nations, The Wall Street Journal, NBC Universal Media LLC, Adobe Systems Inc., GitLab Inc. and the Culinary Institute of America.

With the Journal, Hopin powered the annual Wall Street Journal Health Forum in March, the first time the paper has hosted an event in this way. The event itself involved interactive features, program interviews, moderated lunchtable conversations, networking events and an expo for showing the event’s support partners.

Including the new funding, Hopin has raised $46.4 million to date.

Image: Hopin