The Future of Live Events

The world has experienced a lot of change over the past 18 months. We’ve gone from handshakes to fist bumps and head nods. From open concept office spaces filled with chatty and cheerful co-workers to working from home without any in-person interaction at all.  From live and engaging in-person conferences and events to everything virtual and monotonous zooms. While some things will revert to the way they were before, others have been or will be changed to what Roger McNamee said of the world post dot-com bubble, a New Normal.

We were introduced to co-founders Oana Manolache (CEO) and Andrei Ermilov (CTO) by our friend Adam Struck of Struck Capital. We’ve co-invested with Adam previously and have continued to share interesting founders and companies with each other. During my first Zoom interaction with Oana and Andrei, I was impressed with their backgrounds and history, their confidence and with both the product they showcased and their initial traction.

Oana and Andrei met at Coventry University in the UK. Oana quickly found a marketing role with HP, first in the UK and then moved to the US as the Americas Marketing Strategy Lead.  Andrei started his career with Intel in the UK and then moved over to Microsoft in various engineering roles. Andrei took on numerous projects including leading a team working on the WebRTC networking layer and spoke on the main stage at GTC NVIDIA conference about large scale streaming projects . Oana founded the company in Jan 2019 and Andrei joined one year later. Together they’ve built a terrific product and the start of a special company.

Introvoke offers an embeddable solution that enables any business to host live experiences on their own web property through a robust suite of video communication components. Built entirely in-house, some of these components include virtual stages, dynamic chat rooms, flexible networking hubs and large-scale hybrid event functionality that allows for live events, stages and breakout rooms to exist within the main website and its flow. This enhanced level of scalability and customization creates much more engaging and creative experiences. 

Introvoke graduated from the TechStars’ Comcast NBCUniversal Lift Labs Accelerator Class of 2020 and now counts both TechStars and Comcast NBCUniversal as customers, amongst many other companies of all sizes. I was pleased to see that the 2021 New York Barclays Accelerator Demo Day was run via Introvoke as well and I’m looking forward to seeing many more Introvoke experiences across the web going forward.

Struck led the $2.7 million funding round into Introvoke, covered by TechCrunch. We were very excited to be able to participate in the financing and look forward to helping the team in achieving their goal of making digital gatherings, experiences and remote work as seamless and flexible as in person interactions.

I’m happy to say that ever since our first Zoom meeting, all my other interactions with team Introvoke have been through their service! Jumping in the Introvoke Hub has become the New Normal.