Sure the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the tech titans aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming startups, Built In has launched The Future 5 across 11 major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five tech startups, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. You can check out last quarter’s Boston round-up here.
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When the Covid-19 pandemic began, Palash Soni, Kishore Kothandaraman and Aashish Srinivas had a strong inkling that the transition to remote work would transcend into events. The trio joined forces at Harvard University’s business school and founded Goldcast, a business-to-business hybrid events and marketing platform.
“Even before the pandemic, traditional channels — email marketing, outbound calling, etc. — were becoming less and less effective,” Kothandaraman, co-founder and COO of Goldcast told Built In via email. “When we saw the global shift happening to remote work, we felt events would go through a similar shift — just like advertising — and decided [it] would be the right time to start Goldcast.”
While there are many video streaming platforms out there that businesses can use to host virtual and hybrid events, Goldcast’s unique product offering allows event organizers to add interactive polls and Q&A options to keep audience members engaged and create and upload custom branding banners that display as the background of video live streams. The platform also gives businesses the ability to stream events to a wider audience on YouTube or Facebook.
These features allow Goldcast to double as a hybrid events platform and marketing service by putting the enterprises it serves and their brands first. After each event, Goldcast documents attendee analytics which helps enterprise sales teams track and reach their marketing goals.
“When we saw the global shift happening to remote work, we felt events would go through a similar shift — just like advertising — and decided [it] would be the right time to start Goldcast.”
Since its founding in 2020, Goldcast has raised a $10 million seed round led by Unusual Ventures. The round, announced in February, was used to hire, invest in engineering resources and expand the company’s marketing initiatives to increase brand awareness.
“We chose Unusual Ventures because of the founder services team and [Unusual Ventures general partner] Sandhya Hegde’s deep expertise as an operator and her understanding of B2B marketing,” Kothandaraman said. “Unlike operating folks at other VC funds who primarily offer advice, the founder services team has key performance indicators to hit as part of a structured engagement.”
Today, Goldcast has 85 employees and serves 150 business-to-business customers including big names like Toast, Microsoft, GitHub and others. Kothandaraman said these customers utilize the Goldcast platform to run events of all sizes from small webinars to large-scale, multi-day conferences.
Goldcast plans to hire an additional 2 to 3 employees for its product and customer success teams, with plans to undergo more hiring initiatives next year.
Kothandaraman said his largest aspirations for Goldcast and its staff are for all employees to “fulfill their personal and professional goals by being part of our journey — whether that’s buying a house, paying off their student loan, buying a car, etc.”
“We want our teammates to achieve 10x wealth by being part of Goldcast compared to what they would have been doing otherwise,” he added.
