Today, we announced a completed round of $6 million in Series A funding. It’s the first major raise for Socio, and we did it for the same reason we chose to bootstrap until now.

Because it put us in the best position to serve our customers.

How Socio Got Started

Socio sprang from our own disappointing experiences as event attendees and organizers. So we wondered: What would the perfect event be? What would it feel like for everyone involved? It’d look something like:

  • Attendees: Streamlined networking, personalized content, and more opportunities to engage.
  • Sponsors and exhibitors: Simplified ways of calculating event ROI, capturing leads, and promoting their brands.
  • Organizers: The ability to meet stakeholder expectations by automating as much of the event lifecycle as possible. 

It was on the organizer side where we saw the greatest opportunity to help create more successful events. Because whatever frustrations there are for sponsors and attendees, things are 100 times more demanding for organizers.

That established our vision for Socio. We would build a full-stack event management platform for organizers that connects all pre-, in-, and post-event processes.

Why Now Was the Right Time to Raise

We launched the first piece of that event management platform, the Socio Event App, a little over a year ago. The velocity was outstanding.

Today, more than 400 organizations in nearly 50 countries use the Socio Event App, including Google, Microsoft, HRPA, Harvard, and ICAO. We hit a world-class NPS score of 83, backed up by glowing customer reviews.

And our spectrum of customers—enterprises, SMBs, universities, associations—showed us we were hitting the right cross-section of value. Simple enough for the most basic events, powerful enough for the most complex.

But as exciting as all of that is (and believe me, when you’re a tech entrepreneur, few things excite you as much as watching your team grow and seeing your customers turn into fanatics), we still needed one more thing before raising a Series A.

We needed a roadmap for building the rest of the platform. In listening to our customers tell us what they need most, we found it.

What’s Next

Our ambition is to build the only event management platform organizers will ever need. We know to do that right, we have to build the right things for our customers at the right time.

Product

We launched two new products with this funding announcement. Socio Lead Retrieval gives organizers’ sponsors and exhibitors a seamless way to capture and qualify leads, export to their CRM, and smash ROI.

We’ve also added Live Display, which turns venue screens into branded displays so organizers can engage and inform attendees with custom, dynamic content managed in real time.

Looking forward, our next product will take a huge step toward giving our customers a true full-stack event management system: Socio Event Registration & Onsite. At the same time, we’ll relentlessly improve our Event App, Lead Retrieval, and Live Display by using the excellent feedback our customers give us, as they always do.

Service

We’re proud to have won consecutive “Best Support” awards on G2, but there’s still plenty more to do. We’ll make our award-winning support even better by expanding our customer success team, both in number and location, so we can provide broader coverage.

Marketing

We’ll invest much more in content so event professionals have the thought leadership they need to hit their full potential. Expect to see articles, case studies, guides and more regularly delivered through our blog, email, and social media channels.

Thank You

To conclude, I’d like to say thanks to those who helped get us here.

First, our customers, who are the best event organizers in the world. Thank you for allowing us to be part of your professional journey. The events you throw are amazing, and we can’t wait to see what you do next.

Second, our team. “Be obsessed with customers” is one of our core values. Our award-winning service flows from that, and I’m very proud we’ve prioritized hiring people who understand this.

Last, our investors. In High Alpha Capital and Greenspring Associates, we have two partners who share our vision of revolutionizing events through technology.

Now let’s get back to work. 🚀

– Yarkin Sakucoglu
Co-founder & CEO, Socio