Hopin
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Hopin was a London-based virtual-events platform founded in 2019 by CEO Johnny Boufarhat. It provided tools for companies to plan and run online conferences and large meetings after in-person gatherings disappeared during the pandemic, and became one of the pandemic's breakout startups: it raised more than $1 billion from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Coatue, Tiger Global, Salesforce and others, was valued at nearly $7.7 billion in 2021, grew to about 1,100 employees, and acquired video-streaming company StreamYard. Its customers included Slack, VMware, UPS and Pepsi.
02 / Hopin FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Hopin's boom was tied to a temporary market. When in-person events returned and competitors entered, pandemic-fueled virtual-event demand dried up — its event-discovery listings fell from more than 15,000 in November 2020 to fewer than 500 by April 2022. It raised no new money after 2021 and went through multiple rounds of layoffs affecting hundreds of employees. In August 2023 it sold its flagship Events platform and Session product — the technology assets, customer relationships and much of the team — to RingCentral for $15 million upfront plus $35 million in performance earnouts, a fraction of its $7.7 billion peak valuation; the company continued as a smaller video-streaming business.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Asset sale
Hopin sold its Events and Session products to RingCentral in 2023, with $15 million paid upfront and additional contingent consideration. The transaction covered these products rather than the entire company.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Founded in 2019 in London; became a pandemic-era unicorn, raising over $1 billion at a ~$7.7 billion valuation.
- 02
Demand collapsed as in-person events returned and competitors entered; no new funding after 2021.
- 03
Multiple rounds of layoffs from early 2022 affecting hundreds of employees.
- 04
August 2023: sold Events and Session assets to RingCentral for $15M upfront (+$35M earnouts) — the recorded 2023 asset sale.
- 05
No reliable realized loss figure was disclosed.