Explosive demand for Virtual Event Communities creates opportunity for Bevy to lead category innovation, raises $15 million Series B funding round led by Accel

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Bevy, the only enterprise grade Customer-to-Customer (C2C) platform, today announced a $15MM Series B investment led by global venture capital firm Accel, with participation from existing investors Ryan Smith (co-founder and CEO, Qualtrics), and Upfront Ventures.

A recent study revealed that nearly 80% of founders reported building a community of users as important to their business. Nearly a third of founders believe community is their moat, critical to their success. Bevy was purpose-built to help companies build, grow and scale their C2C communities. Over the past two years, Bevy has experienced significant growth and is poised to meet these new challenges.

"Following the COVID-19 outbreak, the old way of marketing no longer works. Successful teams need to rethink their strategy and rewrite their playbooks. Online forums, webinars and virtual events can't replace the social dynamic of Customer-to-Customer interaction. When you want to build or scale your community virtually, Bevy has every part of that experience for you and your customers covered. It's completely end to end, and no one has anything like this," said Derek Andersen, co-founder and CEO, Bevy. "It's not just about hosting virtual events or conferences. Thanks to our virtual event features that tap into powerful analytics, empower your advocates and stay on brand, Bevy helps you build a real community."

To date, Bevy has  signed dozens of world-class customers using the platform for in-person community building. During these uncertain times, rather than canceling all their events, companies like Asana, Atlassian, Duolingo, Salesforce and Slack rapidly transitioned their community event programs from in-person to virtual, with the help of Bevy's virtual event features. Over the past two months Bevy customers' C2C communities have continued to thrive.

• Salesforce has hosted 650 virtual events with nearly 20,000 attendees
• Duolingo hosted 1,000 virtual events in 6 weeks
• Startup Grind migrated from 0 virtual events in January to 600 events in June

"From our experience as early investors in companies that defined the future of work like Atlassian, Slack and Dropbox, we believe that the team behind Bevy has created a platform that is unmatched in building and growing virtual communities and events at scale," said Ryan Sweeney, partner at Accel.

"In less than 3 years, Bevy has built a roster of customers that would take most other enterprise SaaS companies 10+ years to develop," said Ryan Smith. "No one in the world understands this space better than Bevy. I'm incredibly excited to join Bevy's Board of Directors as the need for virtual community experiences is exploding."

About Bevy

Bevy was built by the team behind Startup Grind - a global community of entrepreneurs. In 2017, the Bevy platform was made available as a commercial SaaS product for brands looking to Build, Grow and Scale their own Customer-to-Customer (C2C) Marketing. Today, Bevy powers global Community initiatives for B2B, B2C, Education, and other business categories for teams who want to build a global Community of Customer Advocates. 

In 2019, Bevy acquired CMX, the largest professional organization in the world, with the mission to help community professionals thrive. In addition to hosting an annual conference, CMX operates local chapters in almost 30 countries. CMX offers training, education and networking opportunities for organizations and individuals to harness the power of community. 

CONTACT: Lincoln Hershberger, (650) 454-7512, [email protected]

SOURCE Bevy

Related Links

https://bevy.com