Cloud Capital: Investing in Airmeet’s Seed Round
Today I’d like to announce Cloud Capital’s investment in Airmeet’s seed round, led by Accel Partners India and joined by Global Founders Capital and Venture Highway. Airmeet is an all-in-one platform to host, discover and attend fully remote events, with a vision to be able to sustain 1M+ live attendees.
Deconstructing the investment thesis:
Gaps in the Offline Model + Proliferation of the ‘Remote’ Culture + Rise of Community Managers
Offline meetups and conferences had for a long time been begging for disruption. Ensuring the sanctity of quality ‘knowledge-sharing’ and ‘meaningful interactions’ in an offline environment has always proven to be difficult. When was the last time you attended a conference and actually came back with a handful of notes? Or had meaningful in-person conversations without people crowding or accidentally butting in? At some point, offline events can be distilled to merely facilitating one-off sales meetings and walking away with random corporate ‘swag’.
Furthermore, with talent now moving towards a remote lifestyle, assembling a physical gathering of like-minded professionals is quite improbable and with diminishing tangible ROI. In fact, Lalit Mangal, Co-founder and CEO, started Airmeet out of a similar necessity when he went completely remote after taking an exit from Quikr; Lalit sold his last startup, CommonFloor, to Quikr for $200 million all-stock deal in 2016.
Fast forward to 2020, Airmeet is carving itself as the next wave of tool stack for Community Managers:
- Legacy: Offline events
- Wave 1: Bundled social-networking
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat - Wave 2: Un-bundled content and distribution
Substack (for written content), Overcast/Spotify (podcasts), and Airmeet (remote meetups and conferences)
Airmeet allows Community Managers to grow their network beyond physical constraints and manage the overall logistics, ie- sending pre-event reminders, circulating recorded sessions, etc.
Cloud Capital + Airmeet
After getting introduced to Airmeet through a colleague and running a session on the platform to talk about AngelList India Syndicates, I was blown away by the refreshing UI/UX and immediately wanted to learn about Lalit’s fundraising plans.
I recently started leading investments through Cloud Capital, an AngelList Syndicate focusing on early-stage opportunities across sectors and bringing together select angels, founders, and operators that savvy founders would love to have on their cap-tables. Few investors who joined Airmeet’s round via Cloud Capital:
- Phanindra Sama (Founder, Redbus)
- Dhruv Agarwala (Founder, Proptiger)
- Sajid Rehman (CEO, Telenor Health)
- Shalin Shah (Investor in Zoom, Coinbase, Jugnoo)
- Adith Podhar (Gemba Capital)
We even ran an Airmeet session for Cloud Capital’s LPs (Limited Partners) to join us for a virtual fireside chat with Lalit.
“Working with Kashish, CloudCapital and AngelList India was efficient, transparent and most importantly quite founder friendly.”
— Lalit Mangal, CoFounder Airmeet.com
We think Community Managers and event organizers will find Airmeet to change the way they run events and the roadmap ahead is truly exciting.
Whilst, we at Cloud Capital are actively looking to engage with early-stage startups, writing cheques from $100–250k. If you’re an angel investor who wants to access our deal flow and invest alongside, then feel free to give me a shoutout and join the Syndicate on AngelList here.
