HeySummit Raises $1 Million to power the next generation of Virtual Events for the Passion Economy

Edinburgh, October 20 – HeySummit, the summit platform used by everyone from SaaStr to children’s Face-Painters, announced a new $1 million round in seed funding. The round is led by Techstart ventures, a top tier Scottish-based seed firm, and include Active Capital, a leading firm with expertise in B2B SaaS companies outside of Silicon Valley, and Ankur Nagpal, CEO and founder of Teachable.

HeySummit provides the marketing and management tools that go into running a multi-talk virtual event like landing pages, speaker management and ticketing, and then integrates with the leading webinar, networking, and video hosting platforms. Aside from Zoom they work with tools like Remo, Livewebinar, GoToWebinar, YouTube Live, RunTheWorld, Icebreaker, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and many more.

The recent financing highlights the growth of online event platforms and the impact they make, especially in the times of Covid. HeySummit, an already capital-efficient business that launched before the crisis hit, has seen explosive growth worldwide. Within the past year alone, HeySummit has served nearly 2 million attendees and hosted over 4,500 events on the platform, exceeding other more established names in the space.

“Online summits have been a tool for digital marketers to share knowledge, but it’s always been complicated and cost-prohibitive for most entrepreneurs,” CEO and co-founder Robert Gelb says, “and now, especially with Covid, there’s an even greater need for distributed, remote ways of sharing knowledge that are easy to customize.”

Founder Benjamin Dell started HeySummit as a side-project to solve his own problem as a soloprenuer.

“I wanted to reach a wide audience, increase my thought leadership, and build my community, but couldn’t find anything that could do the things that really took the most time – the marketing, organizing, and management of the summit.”

“They’re going about virtual events in a new way. For them, it’s a community that you’re building, and what drew us to HeySummit was not just being able to create beautiful summits, but the focus on what to do after the event finishes. It’s much more holistic and valuable,” says Mark Hogarth, Partner at Techstart. HeySummit’s focus on management and customization of the event experience and integrating with leading webinar and video platforms like Zoom, means that the platform is useful to a large cross-section of customers and use-cases.

The UN, Outreach, The Red Cross, Inman, Udemy, Dynatrace and more have used HeySummit to power events in the past few months, however their main customer segment remains the Passion Economy. “Woodprenuers, face-painters, home-schoolers, even basketball coaches use HeySummit to power their online events and jumpstart their communities,” Gelb says.

“We have to rethink the concept of a global event and figure out how to reach a global audience, and HeySummit made it easy for us to get up and running quickly. Our experience has allowed us to look at how we can reach those new people all over the world. Even in a world where we get the global pandemic under control, virtual is here to stay.” Says Christina Brady, Senior Manager, Event Marketing at Udemy.

Benefits of HeySummit include

• Feature-rich: From creating landing pages to selling tickets to managing speakers and affiliates, post-Summit replay and access management
• Flexibility: Live, pre-recorded, and hybrid options to maximize bandwidth, customizable design, attendee flows, mix and match webinar and video platforms, 16+ languages
• Integrations: Zoom, Bigmarker, LiveWebinar, Remo, GoToWebinar, YouTube Live, etc

To learn more about HeySummit and get started with building your own online event, please visit heysummit.com.

About HeySummit

HeySummit makes it easy for anyone to plan, build, and run virtual events. From summits to conferences, talk-series, to video libraries, entrepreneurs all over the world use HeySummit to deliver amazing experiences to attendees and spread knowledge. Based in Scotland, and run remotely from 10 countries around the world, HeySummit is an impact-focused business empowering entrepreneurs to serve millions.

About Techstart Ventures

Techstart Ventures invests in early stage startups across Scotland and Northern Ireland.  Founded in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2015, before expanding to Scotland in 2018, the firm now has over $100M under management. The portfolio in Northern Ireland includes approximately 50 companies and 20 companies in Scotland. Past investments include Chili Connect (sold to Unity) and Titan IC (sold to Mellanox Technologies). Techstart Ventures LLP manages the Scottish Growth Scheme – Techstart Ventures Equity Finance LP Fund – which has been financed by support from the Scottish Government and the European Regional Development Fund from the 2014-20 European Structural Funds Programme. For more information, please visit www.techstart.vc.  

About Active Capital

Active Capital is a venture firm designed to lead seed rounds for B2B SaaS companies outside of Silicon Valley. The firm is founded and run by former B2B SaaS founders with hands on experience starting, building, and scaling high growth businesses in underdog cities across America. Active Capital is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas and invests in B2B SaaS companies all over. To learn more, please visit https://www.activecapital.com.