Online events hosting platform Airmeet has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital India, along with participation from US-based Redpoint Ventures, and existing investors Accel India, Venture Highway, and Global Founders Capital (GFC).

The investment comes as Airmeet is exiting its public beta stage and is readying to open its app for usage by organisations through a freemium model, similar to other software products that are vying for a foothold in the sector.

“A good portion of the funding will be deployed into product and technology development. The second area would be to grow the customer base to 10X in the next 24 months,” said Lalit Mangal, cofounder at Airmeet.

Airmeet claims it is already doing around 1,000 events a month and has a base of close to one million users, which is growing at around 25% month-on-month. It said this growth has been possible though organic word-of-mouth marketing, with 23% of events being created on its platform by people who attended an event on Airmeet.

“Covid-19 has accelerated a permanent behavioral shift across many industries. With digitisation of largely traditional spaces leapfrogging by years, the $800+ billion global offline events space is up for grabs. There is massive potential for players who drive the industry’s transition towards online-events,” said Abhishek Mohan, vice-president, Sequoia Capital India.

Mangal said that Airmeet would also grow its team from around 60 today to 100 employees soon, but would largely retain a lean product heavy team, leveraging the company’s high organic growth. While the company will soon reveal pricing for its product, he said that the focus will not be on revenue growth.

“We have just graduated out of the beta stage. We’re getting one paid customer every six hours, despite not publishing pricing. For the mid-term we’re really not focused on revenues, because this product is a media format innovation and we want to really keep it unshackled rather than locking it,” added Mangal.

While Airmeet credits some of its high growth to the Covid-19 pandemic which disrupted the offline events sector globally, it says there’s a growing base of customers that understand the value of doing events virtually, and the pandemic has only increased that realisation.