LONDON — June 25, 2020 — Teooh, an avatar-based virtual gathering platform, today announced new funding from Spark Capital and General Catalyst to accelerate platform growth and development and make its technology available to a broad set of business and consumer customers. The institutional investment comes amidst a product testing period that facilitated thousands of events and brings Teooh’s total seed fundraising to $4.5 million.
The collective pivot to remote work in recent months and the limitations of popular solutions like Zoom, Teams and Meet have paved the way for new innovation and platform adoption in today’s collaboration ecosystem. The new investment underscores this opportunity and will support aggressive platform development, including the creation of a dozen additional virtual venues for users to meet in, and growth-focused leadership hires.
Since launching in beta in April 2020, Teooh’s custom-built virtual venues have facilitated more than 5,000 virtual events, remote team meetings, personal gatherings and more for attendees ranging from major international businesses to intimate groups of family and friends. From April to May, the platform has experienced 107% growth in events created. With thousands of new events created since, that percentage will continue to grow.
Teooh is placing significant emphasis on expanding venues across three categories: remote meetings, personal gatherings, and virtual events. Slated for release in the next few weeks, additional venues for multi-sized gatherings will feature fireside chat formats, smaller meeting rooms as well as classic virtual meeting features like screen sharing. Teooh will continue to broaden its roster of venues to support every aspect of bringing people together, both professionally and otherwise.
“Webinar platforms fail to deliver social experiences that foster genuine human connection, and ‘being in the right room at the right time’ is primarily why people attend events in the first place,” said Jon Hibbins, co-founder and CTO of Teooh. “The need for building and maintaining community connection remotely has always been essential, and there’s an obvious demand for tools that do more than just livestream our faces. We’ve created a platform that puts us back in the room together so we can do what we do best and what we miss the most when we’re remote—connect with others and create communities.”
“My partners and I are thrilled to invest in Teooh. All of us have experienced the fatigue of traditional video conferencing today and we believe that Teooh has the vision and product to deliver a much more compelling solution for community connection,” said Bijan Sabet, co-founder and General Partner at Spark Capital. “People are using social media and collaboration tools more than ever, but the current video ecosystem lacks the ability to let individuals sit down next to each other and truly connect. Real human connection happens in a shared environment, virtual or physical, and Teooh has created a safe, comfortable space where people can focus on growing genuine relationships. We’re pleased to work with Teooh as the company pursues this massive opportunity.”
As remote work and teams become standard, Teooh is designed to build and maintain lasting connections. Teooh replicates all the benefits of physical gatherings without any of the typical hurdles like travel, cost and time constraints in a way that no other platforms can. Teooh was created with accessibility in mind, granting users entry through mobile devices rather than costly, hard-to-come-by VR headsets. For more information about Teooh and available venues, visit www.teooh.com.
About Teooh
Teooh is an avatar-based virtual gathering platform built to enable consistent community connection without borders or boundaries. Teooh’s custom-built virtual venues let anyone from multinational corporations to small groups of friends design personalized avatars and share common spaces to meet, present, exchange ideas and foster meaningful relationships. Anyone with a mobile device can open their own venue in just a few clicks–no VR headset required. To learn more about Teooh or to create your own virtual event, visit www.teooh.com.
