Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook who became Meta, would not have denied the idea. Like the billionaire at the time of the creation of the famous social in his room at Harvard, it was to remedy the lack of interactions with the students of his university, INSEAD, that Jean Hamon had the idea in 2015 of creating Hivebrite. Unlike its elder, whose idea germinated into a giant valued at 800 billion dollars, his start-up based in Paris turned away from the path aimed at connecting all the beings who populate the earth on the same platform. .
Its solution consists in increasing the number of platforms, but at the scale of local communities. They are offered as a white label to a wide variety of clients – Alumni, associations, NGOs, businesses – and make it possible to create private groups as well as manage events, launch communication campaigns or calls for funding. Directories, forums, mobile applications or calling software are all additional tools offered by Hivebrite.
The Universities of Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Notre Dame, but also the companies Boeing and Roche, and the Obama Foundation are among the few thousand organizations using Hivebrite solutions.
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A real success, although the notoriety of the start-up has not yet reached the general public. To go further, the young company announced this Thursday a fundraising of 35 million dollars, led by investors Quadrille Capital and Insight Partners. Not insignificant in the current period, especially for a start-up in the software world, which is in difficulty. Including the 18 million euros raised just before the start of Covid in January 2020, the overall amount of funds raised by the start-up reached $55 million.
“With this series B, we will continue our innovations – particularly in terms of user experience and AI –, strengthen our positions and set out to conquer new territories,” believes the group’s founder, Jean Hamon, quoted in a communicated. This new money will also make it possible to strengthen its presence in the different regions where it sells its solutions against the payment of an annual subscription. Currently, more than half of the $25 million in revenue comes from the United States, compared to 44% in the Europe and Middle East region and only 4% in the Asia-Pacific region.
