Ciaran Delaney talks Hubli, the ‘Airbnb of meeting venues’ – a company he founded and leads, and why he wants to reinvent how teams come together.
Convenience is a huge deal nowadays and any company able to demonstrate that its product makes busy people’s lives easier tends to do quite well. There is a trend among some newer companies to model themselves after the so-called OG convenience tech platform – Airbnb.
For example, cast your mind back to a catchy headline by my colleague Vish Gain; when profiling the Irish start-up GoPlugable, he described it as wanting to be “the Airbnb of EV charging” – an apt comparison since GoPlugable’s product is a marketplace app that connects EV charging point owners with EV drivers who need to charge their vehicles.
The products are different, as are the target markets, but the USP is the same: convenience. That’s more than likely a statement that entrepreneur Ciaran Delaney would agree with. He compared his own company Hubli to Airbnb quite early on in our conversation, which, coincidentally took place over Zoom while the two of us were stationed in different co-working hubs.
You can book co-working hubs on Hubli, you see, as well as hotels and conference rooms. Hubli is an enterprise platform that serves as a one-stop-shop for people to book meetings, workspaces and group stays or off-sites. It is designed for distributed teams, remote teams, conferences and businesspeople trying to corral a bunch of people in one place to meet in person – no easy feat these days.
An engine of convenience
“We’re like the Airbnb of meeting venues,” Delaney explains. “The venues are all on our platform. They get bookings, through loads of corporate clients that are booking through Hubli. They have a listing on Hubli that they can go into and see their bookings and edit their imagery and so on.”
It is free for any venue anywhere to join the Hubli platform, meaning small local venues and big corporate hotel chains can co-exist together.
Delaney set it up in 2021, but Hubli began as Meetingsbooker.com in 2009. It didn’t have to start from scratch then, in 2021, and it boasts around 200,000 spaces on its books today. Relatively recently, Hubli created an API called Office Connect that helps big companies book their own in-house meeting spaces. It has several big corporations as clients, such as BP, ASML, IBM and Bristol Myers Squibb, which tend to have their own custom profiles with their own company branding.
“So ultimately, we’re helping larger corporations to make it easier and faster for employees to come together to collaborate in person, whether it’s in the office or it’s in an external venue,” says Delaney.
“For a lot of companies, we’re basically the engine that the companies are using to manage that process,” says Delaney. That includes, of course, accommodation. Ideally, companies booking office and meeting spaces for travelling employees might choose a nearby hotel to put them up in, Delaney says.
Greener and leaner meeting options
As well as making in-person meetings more convenient for people, Delaney is also going after another big market: sustainability.
“We created a tool called ‘Where to Meet’, so, if you worked for an organisation and you wanted to organise a conference for, say, 60 people, you can go into the system and input that 20 people are travelling from London; 20 people are travelling from New York; and 20 are travelling from Singapore,” Delaney explains.
“You enter that in the system and then you say they’re flying in economy class or business class. You can even say what class they’re flying in and then you would enter the destinations you’re considering having the meeting in. You would say, for example, you’re thinking of Paris, London and Sydney.
“And the system calculates the carbon consumption to travel to each of those destinations and ranks them by the lowest carbon destination first.”
According to Delaney, “Travel is often one of the biggest consumers of carbon for corporations, depending on the type of company. For a lot of companies when they look at their footprint business travel and meetings can be a big component of it. Any way to reduce that carbon footprint is great.” All the better if it can be done conveniently for big business.
Delaney has noticed that, since the pandemic, the changes brought about by remote work mean more companies are using the likes of Hubli to organise internal meetings as opposed to external ones.
“Dublin would see a lot of that where people are flying in for meetings – for example, they’ve worked for Google or Twitter or Stripe – and they’re flying in for three days to have meetings in their own offices.”
US and global growth plans
Talking of Dublin, Hubli is headquartered there. But, for the moment, Delaney is based in New York where he is growing Hubli’s presence in the US. The US move is necessary because “a lot of the large organisations that we’re signing now, a lot of the decision-makers for our technology are based in the US,” he says.
“We’ve hired quite a few people in the US. We’re seeing a lot of growth; this year we will have bookings in nearly 70 countries on Hubli.” Delaney is keen to point out that while the company is global and it is growing in the US, it still remains connected to its Dublin base. On the occasion he speaks to SiliconRepublic.com, Hubli’s staff had an off-site meet-up in Dublin. Naturally enough, the whole thing was organised through the platform. But when they’re not on off-sites, Hubli employees can work anywhere. “We’ve adapted to that style of environment where people can work from anywhere,” says Delaney.
The model of convenience seems to be catching on for Hubli. “This year we have had a 3x growth in corporate clients, and we’ve also won our first Fortune 10 clients.” Delaney is reluctant to divulge too much data so he doesn’t say who they are, but he does say they are going to add “up to half a million employees to Hubli, which is mind-boggling”.
“And we have 50pc of the top 10 pharma companies in the world using Hubli.” So, what of future plans? “The plans for next year, I think, would be continued growth in the company. We plan to double our team size. We’re launching a lot of new products. We’re always launching new technology,” says Delaney.
Before we say our goodbyes he reiterates the convenience USP. “Our goal is to help companies reinvent how they meet and foster easier and faster in-person collaboration.”
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