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Aug 06, 2023

RingCentral acquires Hopin’s flagship virtual event platform

UPDATED 17:15 EDT / AUGUST 02 2023 by Maria Deutscher RingCentral Inc. today announced that it’s acquiring startup Hopin Ltd.’s flagship Events platform, which is used by companies to host virtual and

UPDATED 17:15 EDT / AUGUST 02 2023

by Maria Deutscher

RingCentral Inc. today announced that it’s acquiring startup Hopin Ltd.’s flagship Events platform, which is used by companies to host virtual and hybrid events.

RingCentral is also buying a second product called Session from the startup. It’s a cloud service for hosting webinars, virtual breakout sessions and other small-scale online gatherings.

Belmont, California-based RingCentral is a publicly traded provider of collaboration software. Its flagship product is a videoconferencing application called RingCentral Video. The company also sells software for powering conference room equipment, a webinar hosting platform and a number of other tools including an online fax service.

Hopin, meanwhile, is a venture-backed startup based in London. The Events platform that it has agreed to sell to RingCentral is used by companies to host virtual events and manage related tasks such as marketing. The platform’s customer base includes VMware Inc., PepsiCo Inc. and other major enterprises.

The main component of Events is a service called Virtual Venue. It allows companies to create a reception page for an online event, stream video content to as many as 100,000 attendees and host breakout sessions. Hopin’s Events platform also includes two other tools that help companies manage video content and create landing pages to promote their events.

The compamy experienced rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. The startup expanded its workforce from fewer than 10 employees at the start of 2019 to more than 800 in late 2021. Along the way, it raised about $1 billion in venture funding.

Its most recent funding round was a $450 million Series D investment that was announced in August 2021. After the raise, the startup signaled that it was expecting many customers to shift their focus back to in-person events in 2022. Over the next 12 months, Hopin made a series of layoffs that reduced its headcount by more than a third.

“We recognized that our events business, and the immense talent behind it, could grow to its fullest potential within the RingCentral ecosystem due to its global scale, respected brand, and go-to-market capabilities as a leading UCaaS platform,” Hopin founder and Chief Executive Officer Johnny Boufarhat wrote in a blog post today.

Besides Events, RingCentral is also buying Hopin’s Session service. Session is primarily geared towards hosting small online events. Alongside its core video streaming features, the service provides an analytics tool for measuring user engagement and various other capabilities.

As part of the transaction, RingCentral will hire engineering, product and go-to-market professionals from Hopin who worked on Events and Session. The two platforms’ respective customers will likewise move over to the company.

Hopin, for its part, plans to refocus on its remaining products. The startup offers a live streaming service known as StreamYard and also operates a video hosting platform. Additionally, it’s rolling out a new enterprise product called Superwave that is designed to help companies share content such as product updates with customers.

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