Not many startups can claim Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta as paying customers, but Confetti can. And the list doesn’t stop at a quintet with a collective market value of $10 trillion — the New York-based company says it works with Zoom, Netflix, Stripe, TikTok, Shopify, Adobe, LinkedIn, HubSpot and 30% of Fortune 500.
That’s about 8,000 companies in total. Not bad going for an events and team building startup that was blindsided by a pandemic that drove much of its target market to hunt behind closed doors, forcing Confetti to rebuild its business model in a matter of weeks.
Most companies would be happy to have just a few of the trillion-dollar tech giants on Confetti’s client list, so it’s especially remarkable that a fairly under-the-radar startup can claim so many big-name logos.
“These companies use Confetti dozens—some even hundreds—of times a year, for a huge range of use cases.” CEO and co-founder Lee Rubin he told TechCrunch. “Such as seasonal occasions like Halloween, Black History Month, holiday parties, or goal-oriented activities like competition building, communication, or wellness.”
Today, Confetti claims $12 million in revenue, which it predicts will grow to $15-20 million by the end of the year — and to fuel that growth, the company announced a $16 million Series A funding round with led by Israeli Entrée Capital and IN Venture.
How does it work
Example of a confetti product page. Image Credits: Confetti
Companies use Confetti to bring team building experiences to their remote teams, with support for hybrids as well.
Want to foster camaraderie through virtual baking or cocktail making? Confetti takes care of it all, including contacting local suppliers and shipping ingredients directly to employees. Imagine some interactive games like quizzes, Pictionary or charades? Again, Confetti makes it all clear — all games are designed in-house, from ideation to creation.
“The platform takes care of the entire event execution process,” Rubin said.
That wasn’t always the case though — Confetti started out more as a marketplace connecting companies with event providers. However, this placed a lot of responsibility on the organizer to join the dots and ensure an unforgettable event for all concerned – that’s why Confetti went more into an end-to-end platform that sorts it all out from start to finish.
“A marketplace only solves the issue of finding ideas and vendors to provide them, but the entire burden of quality assurance and event execution still falls on the customer who has to communicate directly with the vendor,” Rubin said. “Also, most event providers are non-corporate, offering the same content to any group for any purpose. We understand that our customers need content tailored to the cultural challenges they face in a work environment.”
Rubin also draws analogies to how Netflix — one of his clients — started as a content aggregator that turned into a content producer to give it more control over the product it sells.
“[It’s all about] creating the content from the ground up, in a consistent way across all of our experiences that are tailored to building a remote or hybrid work culture,” said Rubin.
Complexities
In a previous job, Rubin says she was tasked with organizing a team-building event, an endeavor that turned out to be more difficult than she first imagined.
“At first I thought it would be easy, but then I realized how much is involved – coming up with ideas, looking for suppliers online, negotiating with them – all with fingers crossed that my team will have a good time. Rubin explained. “So I asked myself: Is there an easier way to create meaningful events that are easy to program?”
And so in 2017, Rubin and co-founder CTO Eyal Hakim launched Confetti, designed to take the complexity out of organizing group events and experiences. But that was seven years ago – a lifetime away in terms of where the world is with attitudes towards remote work. The pandemic has forced nearly every company to embrace remote work, meaning Rubin and Hakim had to change things pretty quickly.
“When we started, we focused exclusively on in-person events, helping companies organize office events,” Rubin said. “When the pandemic hit, we had to quickly pivot and after two grueling weeks, our prototype was already ready, ready to sell. I believe this rapid change is a testament to how startups need to be able to stay flexible and see challenges as opportunities to grow beyond their initial boundaries.”
Furthermore, the pivot appears to have been a net benefit for Confetti, in that it allowed it to tap into a much larger market.
“After moving to virtual events, we realized that this route was much more scalable — you can serve clients around the world without relying on a physical presence,” Rubin said. “So in a way, we’ve really made the most of the constraints that the pandemic has put on our business.”
So far, Confetti has raised around $2 million in various seed, angel and venture rounds, with backers including Correlation Ventures, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and Delivery Hero co-founder and CEO Niklas Östberg. With another $16 million in the bank, Confetti is well-funded to “shape the future of remote work culture,” as the company puts it, and that will include building products around a recurring revenue model with support for companies multiple groups.
Corporate account
As Confetti began working with more companies, it realized that — especially with larger companies — there can be many different people from different teams using the Confetti platform. This was a consequence of the product-driven development strategy it had used from the start, which is why it in part turned to dedicated sales teams to ensure a more cohesive “company” experience, complete with different pricing structures and packages to keep them coming back.
“Now that we have thousands of customers, we realized that within each company we often have many different employees who found us separately and book from us completely separately,” Rubin said. “To provide our customers with even greater value, we decided to create a sales team for the first time that would speak to the decision makers at these companies to offer Confetti as a company-wide solution for team building strategy. With this, we introduced our new ‘corporate program’, which, compared to our pay-as-you-go program, offers companies many additional benefits and incentives.”
Example of a company account. Image Credits: Confetti
Today, a big part of Confetti’s offering is automation — workflows designed to remove many of the manual steps involved in organizing an event or team-building experience. For example, once a company provides all the required booking details, hosts are scheduled (and paid upon completion), virtual event rooms are created, kits are planned for shipment, and invitations are sent and feedback is sought.
It’s this automation that Rubin believes is one of the things that sets him apart from other players. However, it is worth noting that competitors such as Luna Park, Teambuilding.com, Outback team building and Marco Experiences they also claim some of the same prestige clients that Confetti does, which means organizations aren’t putting all their team building eggs in one basket.
So while there’s competition, sure, Confetti is pushing to position it as a stickier proposition for businesses — particularly in the enterprise sector. While most of its experiences have historically billed based on headcount, Confetti is pushing for more sustainable recurring revenue streams.
“We already provide companies with options to buy Credits confetti, which can be used to purchase experiences on our platform,” said Rubin. “Additionally, we offer Confetti Credits (incentivized) subscriptions, enabling designers and companies to seamlessly plan and execute their virtual team building strategy year-round. In 2024, we will increasingly rely on bundles and subscriptions, particularly as we scale our SLG [sales-led growth] movement.”
