Hopin

Hopin is a platform for running virtual and hybrid events — online conferences, trade shows, webinars, and networking events that attendees join from anywhere. At its core, Hopin let an organizer build a virtual venue with a main stage for keynotes, breakout sessions, sponsor booths, and networking areas where attendees could meet, all inside a browser. It became one of the defining tools of the early-2020s shift to remote events, when in-person gatherings largely stopped and organizers scrambled for a way to hold conferences online. That timing drove an extraordinary rise — Hopin grew fast and raised a great deal of money, reaching a peak valuation reported around $7.75 billion. The product answered a genuine, sudden need — marketers, event teams, and communities used it to keep gathering audiences when physical events were impossible.

But Hopin's story is also a cautionary one about demand that a moment created and then withdrew, and writing about the company honestly means saying so. As in-person events returned, the surge in pure-virtual demand receded, and the pandemic-scale valuation proved unsustainable. In 2023 Hopin sold its core Events and Session products — the event-hosting and in-event engagement tools that were arguably the heart of the business — to RingCentral, with the widely reported upfront figure around $15 million, a fraction of what the company had raised and been valued at. The remaining business kept streaming-focused products such as StreamYard. So when the name Hopin comes up today, the accurate framing is a platform that soared on pandemic-era virtual events and then contracted sharply, with its flagship event assets now under RingCentral's ownership.

Hopin is worth distinguishing from simpler webinar and video tools on one side and from in-person events on the other. A basic webinar platform broadcasts one presentation to a passive audience — one-to-many, little interaction. Hopin aimed higher, recreating more of a real conference — multiple simultaneous sessions, sponsor booths, and, crucially, attendee-to-attendee networking, trying to capture the serendipitous 'hallway' encounters that make live events valuable. That ambition is exactly what made it feel like a venue rather than a broadcast tool, and it is the feature set RingCentral acquired. If you only need to broadcast a talk, a webinar tool suffices; the case for a full virtual-events platform is the interactive, multi-track, networking-rich experience.

Against in-person events, the honest picture is that virtual platforms like Hopin are a substitute with real trade-offs, not a replacement. Virtual events scale globally, cost less to attend, and leave rich behavioral data — who watched what, who visited which booth — that a physical event cannot easily capture. But they struggle to reproduce the depth of in-person connection and the attention a room commands, and 'virtual event fatigue' set in as the novelty wore off and audiences drifted during sessions they would have sat through live. The market's swing back toward in-person and hybrid formats, which sit between the two, is the very shift that undercut Hopin's pure-virtual peak. The lesson embedded in the comparison is that format demand moves with circumstances, and a tool built for one extreme moment can be exposed when the moment passes.

If you run virtual or hybrid events, the enduring good practices survive Hopin's specific fortunes. Design for engagement rather than broadcast — build in interaction, networking, and reasons to stay, because online attention is fragile and audiences leave silently. Use the behavioral data a virtual platform captures to qualify leads and follow up, which is one genuine advantage over a physical room. Match the format to the goal — a global product launch may suit virtual, a high-trust sales relationship may need in-person, and many events land best as hybrid. And when choosing a platform, weigh the vendor's stability, because event tooling has consolidated and changed hands, as Hopin's own history shows — a platform can be sold or wound down between your events.

The traps are both operational and, in Hopin's case, strategic. Operationally, teams treat a virtual event as a long webinar and lose the audience to fatigue, or ignore the data the platform hands them. Strategically, Hopin itself illustrates the risk of building on surge demand — a valuation and a business scaled to a temporary spike proved fragile when normal conditions returned. For anyone writing about or citing Hopin, the failure mode is describing it as a still-thriving unicorn rather than a company that fell sharply and sold its core assets to RingCentral in 2023. Accuracy here means acknowledging both the real product and the real decline, and drawing the sober lesson about demand that a moment inflates.

Hopin is a virtual and hybrid events platform that surged during the pandemic and then sold its core Events and Session assets to RingCentral in 2023 amid a sharp decline.

Etymology: source.

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

View interest-over-time on Google Trends →

Areas of marketing where hopin is a core concern: