Throughout the pandemic, digital connectivity has played an increasingly important role in how we stay connected, which, for many, has increased the importance of online communities and events.
The global virtual events market size was valued by Grand View Research at $77.98 billion in 2019 and is now expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.2% from 2020 to 2027. While recent research by the GovLab indicated that 3 out of 4 people believe that the most important community they're a part of operates online.
As a result of the booming online community and events industry, more and more platforms are being introduced to the market. At the moment there are tools available for small events, for large events, for roadshows and on the other side there are tools that allow you to engage with your community. What if you could create and run online experiences, from events to daily community interactions, in one unified platform?
That’s the ambitious target of the team at Airfair. The team is creating an all in one engagement platform aiming to not only invite your audience to join for events, but stay for the community, by offering them a personalized, social experience where they can interact with each other, watch content from past events and join upcoming ones, all year round.
This week we caught up with Salim Semaoune, the Co-Founder and CTO of Airfair to find out more about how they are planning to change the face of online experiences forever.
Startup Name: Airfair
Industry: Community + Virtual event platform
Location: Paris
Date founded: 2020
Number of employees: 15
Website: https://www.airfair.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/airfair-io
Vonage API used: Video API
We provide software to run virtual events and engage your community all year long.
We help event organizers, owners of digital native communities and tech companies to engage their audience all year round through virtual events, webinars and a community space, from a single platform.
All in one engagement platform: with Airfair, our customers can run various formats on a single platform. Most of the solutions that exist are just simple tools to easily go online to do a product demo, a webinar or other formats of live streams.
But when the event is varied, all this content is lost, and your community lives only in your CRM. At Airfair, we want to give a platform where your community members will engage all year long.
Partech (France) - DN Capital (UK) + several US/UK/EU-based business angels
The biggest challenge that we face right now is that we want to provide an all in one platform so that the organizers don’t have to glue multiple tools that don’t necessarily play well together. It requires us to build tons of features while still keeping the focus on our + alpha feature set.
We’ve tried to build too well, and should have released a less clean product and iterate faster with customer feedback
We’d pick Bill Gates, as he was a pioneer of creating a software ecosystem
Recruited an amazing team
Released a product
Signed and onboarded first 3 customers
We want to become the de-facto platform for engaging your audience online.
At Vonage for Startups, we help early-stage startups better understand Communications APIs' power and enable them to utilise these tools better. We provide the necessary educational resources and a supportive environment for the startup community to benefit from Communications APIs, whatever their individual needs are.
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