Goldcast Raises $10Million Led by Unusual and HubSpot Ventures to Help B2B Marketers Run Engaging Events And Drive Revenue

We are thrilled to announce that Goldcast, the purpose-built platform for B2B field and event marketers to host interactive virtual and hybrid events, just closed a $10 million funding round led by Unusual Ventures with an amazing group of investors, founders, and executives joining the family – Hubspot Ventures, Afore Capital, Underscore VC, Scott Belsky (CPO, Adobe), Manik Gupta (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft), Chandar Pattabhiram (CMO, Coupa), Elissa Fink (former CMO, Tableau), Elias Torres (Co-founder, Drift), Sangram Vajre (Co-founder, Terminus), Kris Rudeegraap (Co-founder, Sendoso), Guillaume “?” Cabane (GP, Hypergrowth Partners), Lenny Rachitsky (ex-Product Lead, Airbnb), and Sriram K. (Investor, Kearny Jackson) as well as Dave Gerhardt as brand advisor. . We are also thrilled to welcome Sandhya Hegde of Unusual Ventures to our board of directors. Sandhya’s experience leading marketing at Amplitude will be a tremendous asset as we scale the business.

We are catalyzing a massive shift happening in B2B marketing. Today, no one wants to read gated content, and marketing emails rarely make it to the priority inbox. Regular channels of marketing are crowded, and it is increasingly hard to stand out.

Companies have traditionally used events to build a real connection between their brand and their customers and battle the crowds in traditional channels. I have seen the challenges with events as a marketing channel first-hand.

 

While working closely with event teams at my last company, I realized that, though a sizable portion of our marketing budgets went into events, we never were able to scale their reach and get tangible data for helping our sales and marketing teams close more revenue. This stood in stark contrast with all other marketing activities such as emails and ads, that were moving towards scalability, measurability, and tied well with the company’s top line.

Virtual and Hybrid events have changed that. When COVID emerged in 2020, we saw events as an opportunity to build a new, scalable engagement channel. While many platforms solved well for organizing fun virtual events – from fundraisers to concerts, there was nothing that was really designed for B2B marketers from the ground up.

Event marketers still faced many hurdles scaling events—designing a beautiful event experience, ensuring that the event goes well without unnecessary stress, sending data seamlessly to their systems of records, and facilitating sales interactions with prospects. These processes were manual and cumbersome at best, or simply not possible at all.

When the idea for Goldcast first hit us, Aashish, Kishore and I were still in Harvard Business School doing our MBA. To satisfy our hunch, we cold emailed hundreds of event marketers in the summer of 2020, and many generously devoted their time to explain their pain points to us.

 

By the end of it, our conviction in the opportunity was so strong that we decided to take a plunge and become full-time founders. All of this amidst a tough immigration environment, challenging circumstances with COVID, and with scary student l****. There was just something in the vision that  compelled us to start Goldcast despite the challenges.

Over the past 18 months, we have built a platform for B2B marketers that use events as an important Go-To-Market channel to meet their pipeline goals. We took inspiration from Netflix to deliver a user experience that has a very high-production value and puts brands in the spotlight.

Marketers use Goldcast to host a range of events from small, monthly webinars to large-scale user conferences in virtual and hybrid formats. We provide powerful and actionable account based insights that sales teams use for their post-event follow ups for better MQL to SQL conversions, and we do this many times better than anyone else out there.

We have grown 10x over the past year, and hundreds of marketing teams from high-growth companies such as Drift, Salesloft, and Attentive to public companies including Weave, Toast, Avalara, and Microsoft GitHub are using Goldcast to host engaging events and create qualified opportunities for their business.
This is just a beginning, and everything we do today underlies a big vision we have for events as a scalable marketing channel.

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Our goal is for Goldcast to do for event marketing what Hubspot did for CRM and Marketo for email nurture. We want to replace a host of disconnected horizontal tools that marketing teams use to deliver events with a single end-to-end platform that can help marketers plan, manage, deliver, and above all, measure event programs. We want to supercharge all areas of B2B marketing that rely on events—demand gen, corporate events, field marketing, partner and channel marketing, and community management. We are well on our way there, having become a key part of the modern B2B go-to-market stack for our customers, helping marketers easily organize great events that engage and nurture their audience and back it with a data platform for actionable insights and clear attribution to revenue.

We are super grateful to all our customers, who believed in us, gave us the right feedback and helped us get here. We are passionate about the event marketing community and this funding helps us solidify our direction to build the go-to platform for modern B2B event marketers.