SCOOCS secures first investment round to double-down on smart events and communities

We are excited to share with our clients and the market that SCOOCS just raised 1 million euros in investment from business angel Sebastian Loh, a renowned businessman from Germany, who decided to invest in SCOOCS after attending an event as a participant, meeting the team and confirming that not only the product and market has a lot of potential, but also the team behind it is fierce and excited to win.

The Co-Founder and CEO of SCOOCS Francisco Chambel is thrilled about this round “Myself and the whole team are excited to have Mr. Loh on board. Next to the investment, his business acumen, vast network and hands-on mentality is something that SCOOCS will immensely profit from in the next growth stage”.

Born from necessity in 2020 and fortunately just a couple weeks before COVID lockdowns, Prof. Dr. René Bohnsack started a virtual event platform to host his own conference on the topic of Sustainability and Digitalization exactly to showcase that conferences can be more sustainable and inclusive. Market demand combined with years of experience in building digital platforms and a team that built award-winning e-learning platforms before, led to the birth of SCOOCS (Smart Customizable, Online, Offline, Communities for Sustainability).

Fate has been kind to us, even though not for the best reasons (COVID), and without any external investment we were able not only to sustainably grow, but also serve internationally well-known customers, including large corporations such as Samsung, institutions such as the United Nations or German government or universities across the globe.

IS IT A GOOD TIME TO INVEST IN EVENT PLATFORMS…?
Yes, COVID is slowing down, people are thriving for in-person connections, but not only virtual interactions existed way before COVID, but most importantly, the smart so called “new normal” is here to stay.

Throughout our client base and our clients’ customers, we receive the feedback that the majority still would like to have the option to attend events online. Not only does it save a lot of time, but also costs and CO2. Additionally, demand for onsite events is becoming more sophisticated. The advantages of efficient matchmaking, community building and seamless connection between the offline and online world are increasing. SCOOCS is ideally positioned to capture existing and newly emerging markets.

WHAT’S NEXT

The funding enables SCOOCS to double-down and accelerate what the team around Francisco Chambel, an INSEAD Alumni, had already planned or started. The core pillars of the growth strategy are:

Smart events: At SCOOCS we want to make sure that our platform remains 100% customizable but more intuitive to use not only for participants but also for hosts when setting-up and moderating events. With smart features, the platform will adapt to each specific user needs, leveraging user profiles to understand user behavior and map it against similar users’ past experiences. All this of course ensuring that we keep highest GDPR standards and the competitive prices.

On-site capabilities and Expansion: On-site interactions are a must for virtual platforms, and we also aim to strengthen SCOOCS added value in this field. We’ve had some fully on-site events that used just our Mobile app, and it is now clear that SCOOCS provides differentiating engaging experiences, but the goal is to develop this branch further and push sales efforts to ensure that we enable more customers to benefit from it.

Communities: Last but not least, the next step is to move forward towards the SCOOCS modular community platform. The way we are setting it up will enable clients to decide which modules they want to use (registration, marketing, engagement, streams, booths, etc.) and either build communities on top of their own SCOOCS platform or integrate SCOOCS modules directly in their own environments.

Sebastian Loh is really excited to join this journey: “SCOOCS has been a great platform for our own events. To participate in the realization of an event and to experience the features in my own environment was definitely a booster to look into this market. I believe that there are tremendous growth opportunities combining onsite and online participants in one platform.”