Hopin, the UK-based virtual conference service, which raised a total of $1 billion in capital from a who’s who of tech investors has been sold to RingCentral for an undisclosed amount.
As RingCentral has a market capitalization of $3.3 billion and the CEO and founder is leaving it looks like a fire sale. He should not be hurting financially as he sold secondary shares for about $200 million along the way (!).
I don’t have any direct insights, but this seems to be that COVID momentum made Hopin grow really, really fast and that led to a $7.7 billion valuation at the top (possibly/likely/hopefully with preference shares as that changes the risk quite a bit, but it likely didn’t help in this case as I read it as Hopin’s business shrunk and RingCentral picked up the assets on the cheap).
That things don’t work out is common in venture capital investing, the difference in this case is the scale of capital raised.
