Airmeet Inc., which operates a startup focussed on hosting online events, has raised $3 million (approximately Rs 22.20 crore at current exchange rates) in a funding round led by Accel India.
Other investors that participated in the round include VentureHighway, AngelList, LetsVenture, the Germany-based Global Founders Capital and Sequoia Scout.
Angel investors redBus co-founder Phanindra Sharma, Livspace co-founder Ramakant Sharma, Unacademy’s Gaurav Munjal, CommonFloor’s Sumit Jain, Kawa Space founder Krish Nair and Telenor Health founder Sajid Rahman also contributed to the round.
The Bengaluru-based company said in a statement it will use the funds to enhance its technological infrastructure to expand the kinds of events its platform can host.
VCCircle has reached out to Airmeet on the details of the investment exercise and will update this report accordingly.
Airmeet was founded by Lalit Mangal, Vinay Kumar Jaasti and Manoj Kumar Singh in 2019. The firm lets users leverage its platform to broadcast events and allow participants and attendees to interact and network with one another.
Mangal said the company is in talks with several conferences that are looking into the possibility of virtual events because of the coronavirus epidemic that has affected several countries.
Airmeet says its technology will let customers gain a ten-fold jump in community engagement. It also offers one-to-one and one-to-many interactions that can be hosted on an open or private level, according to its website.
Mangal claimed that Airmeet’s platform can accommodate around a million people concurrently for an event, the statement added.
Before co-founding Airmeet, Mangal was acting as an advisor to Unacademy and Evibe Technologies. A graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology – Roorkee, he also served as the co-founder and chief product officer for CommonFloor. Jaasti, meanwhile, is a graduate of the IIT-Kanpur. He has also worked with CommonFloor and other firms such as BlackBuck and Shotang India.
The investment in Airmeet is Accel’s latest bet on an Indian startup since the venture capital firm raised $550 million (around Rs 3,942 crore) for a new fund in December last year to make seed and early-stage investments in the country.
The fund came three years after its fifth fund, where it had raised $450 million. Speaking on its sixth fund, the VC said it was confident of accelerating digital adoption in sectors such as food delivery, digital payments, education, insurance, and real estate.
According to VCCEdge, the data research arm of Mosaic Digital, other companies that Accel India has backed this year include Openhouse Technologies, SZS Tech, Rupeek Fintech, and Yellow Drive Technologies.
Accel has also been the first VC to back companies such as Acko, Blackbuck, BookMyShow, Bounce, BrowserStack, Clevertap, Curefit, Mindtickle, Moglix, Ninjacart, Portea, Rupeek, Samunnati, StanzaLiving, UrbanClap, and Zenoti among others.