Socio Expands Event Management Platform, Raises $6 Million In Series A Funding
August 6, 2019
Socio has added two new products to its event management platform and has raised $6 million in Series A funding.
Like the Socio Event App, Socio Lead Retrieval and Socio Live Display focus primarily on the in-event experience. According to Socio officials, these new offerings align with Co-founder and CEO Yarkin Sakucoglu’s vision of Socio becoming “the only software event organizers need throughout the lifecycle of their events.”
“The average B2B company spends around 22 percent of its marketing budget on events,” said Sakucoglu. “When done right, events are the most powerful source of lead generation, brand exposure, and marketing ROI. Knowing how hard it is to execute events right, we want to give organizers a full-stack solution that simplifies their work and maximizes ROI across the entire event lifecycle.”
The infusion of $6 million in Series A Funding will largely support two goals for Socio: help to rapidly grow its teams at its North American headquarters in Indianapolis and its EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) office in Istanbul; and accelerate the development of products designed help event organizers put on successful events and meetings.
High Alpha Capital, a venture studio focused on building next-generation enterprise cloud companies, led the investment round with participation from Greenspring Associates. Mike Fitzgerald, partner at High Alpha, will join Socio’s board.
“Socio is winning business from sophisticated event marketers with tools that are both simple and powerful, which is not an easy combination in B2B software,” Fitzgerald said. “We’ve been incredibly impressed with this team and look forward to partnering with them as they continue building the premier event management platform for marketers.”
In addition to its hiring wave that will triple its headcount by the end of 2020, Socio’s development of several more enterprise-ready products is underway. Next up will be the company’s first pre-event product focused on event registration.
In a little over a year, Socio’s client base has grown to more than 400 customers in nearly 50 countries, with a host of big-name customers including Google, Harvard University and Pinterest along with other major enterprises, associations and universities.
For Pradeep U.N., director of customer and field experiences at Microsoft, using the Socio platform to help run and manage the company’s Services Executive Board meetings throughout the world has been an incredible time, energy and money saver. Instead of relying on custom software and developers, he now automates these content-heavy and security-conscious events to host all content in a central area, make real-time updates as needed, provide strong online security and foster a community where event participants can chat and interact.
“Without Socio, it took me four weeks, a product manager, three developers, and a ridiculous amount of cash and monthly cloud fees,” U.N. said. “I was up with the same thing with Socio in four hours.”
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