Startup Deep Dive : Airmeet — it grew 24x in a year, then cut 80% of its tech team

In 2021, Airmeet’s recurring revenue grew 24 times over in twelve months, as the pandemic turned every conference, town hall and college orientation into a browser tab (Sequoia-backed Series A announcement, September 2020, and company Series B materials, February 2022). Three years later, the same company fired 80% of its own engineering team and told the press it would stop upgrading the product that had made it famous (Inc42, September 2024).

Airmeet is a Bengaluru-founded, India-built virtual and hybrid events platform that rode the biggest tailwind a category has ever had, then had to survive the tailwind disappearing. Its story is a clean case study in what happens after a demand shock ends: the founders, the funding, the numbers on the way up and the numbers on the way down, and the pivot the company is now betting its remaining team on.

Quick facts

What they do

Airmeet sells software that runs live virtual and hybrid events: webinars, multi-day conferences, town halls, customer summits and training programmes, for brands that want an audience to show up online and actually interact rather than sit muted in a webcast. Its buyers are B2B marketing, customer-success, HR and events teams at mid-market and enterprise companies; publicly named customers across its marketing materials over the years include Flipkart, University College London, Rotman School of Management, ViacomCBS, Walmart, Volvo, Accenture, HackerRank and the University of Toronto (Airmeet Series B announcement, February 2022; Naspers portfolio profile, November 2022; company website, accessed September 2026). The pitch that separated it from a plain video call was “engagement”: branded virtual lounges, speed-networking tables, breakout rooms and session analytics built to recreate the side conversations of an in-person event, not just the stage.

The origin

Lalit Mangal was not a first-time founder when he started Airmeet. He had co-founded CommonFloor, an online real-estate listings platform, in 2007 alongside Sumit Jain and Vikas Malpani; Quikr acquired CommonFloor in a stock-and-cash deal reported at $200 million, announced in January 2016, and all three CommonFloor founders left Quikr roughly a year after the deal closed (Inc42, January 2016; Wikipedia, “Commonfloor”, accessed September 2026). Mangal spent time afterward as Chief Product Officer at hospitality chain RedDoorz before turning, in 2019, to a new problem: most people who wanted to be part of a professional community or a big industry conversation could not physically be in the room where it happened.

Mangal founded Airmeet in Bengaluru in June 2019 with Manoj Kumar Singh and Vinay Kumar Jaasti as co-founders, with Jaasti taking the CTO role. The founding bet was that remote and dispersed participation in events was an underserved, permanent shift, not a niche one; Mangal later told Crunchbase News that awareness of remote work’s possibilities was still limited in India at the time, and that people who had moved away from the country’s major hub cities were shut out of the professional-networking opportunities concentrated there (Crunchbase News, September 2020). The company raised a $3 million seed round in March 2020, from Sequoia Capital India, Accel India, Venture Highway and Global Founders Capital, just as that thesis was about to be tested by an event nobody had built a business plan around.

The struggle years

Airmeet’s setbacks did not come in its founding years; they came after the boom, when the tailwind that built the company reversed. Three separate rounds of layoffs inside sixteen months mark the company’s hardest stretch, each one disclosed on the record by CEO Lalit Mangal:

• May 2023: roughly 75 employees, about 30% of a 250-300 person workforce, let go across sales, marketing, tech and operations in India, the US and Europe. Mangal cited “drastically reduced marketing budgets everywhere and rapid commoditization of the virtual event category” (Inc42, May 2023).
• March 2024: a second restructuring cut roughly 20% of the remaining workforce, weighted toward the tech team. Mangal framed it as a shift from product R&D toward go-to-market spend, saying the company had “strong signs of product superiority and maturity” and was reallocating resources accordingly (Inc42, March 2024).
• August-September 2024: a third exercise removed about 30 more employees (roughly 20% of the then-current headcount) but concentrated the damage on engineering, cutting 80% of the tech team along with parts of product and design. Mangal said the company had “right sized the team to focus on investing in better and more AI-powered features” (Inc42, September 2024).

Inc42 tallied more than 100 people let go across the three rounds inside sixteen months. The reason given each time was consistent and unsoftened: virtual-event demand, and the marketing budgets that funded it, had been a pandemic artefact, and the category was being commoditized faster than Airmeet could out-build competitors on features alone.

The turning point

The defining before-and-after moment in Airmeet’s history is the pandemic itself, arriving weeks after the company had closed its seed round. Before March 2020, Airmeet was a year-old, sub-$5 million-raised startup with an unproven thesis about remote community participation. Within months of national lockdowns beginning, that thesis stopped being a bet and became the default way organisations ran events. By its Series A announcement in September 2020, Airmeet had hosted more than 10,000 events since July of that year alone, and it raised $12 million from Sequoia Capital India and Redpoint Ventures, with Accel India, Venture Highway, Global Founders Capital and angel investor Gokul Rajaram also participating (Crunchbase News, September 2020). The company said it aimed to grow its team from 60 to 100 people across six countries. By the time of its Series B in February 2022, Airmeet described its recurring revenue as having scaled 24 times over in a year, at roughly 30% month-on-month growth, with more than 120,000 event organisers having used the platform and 150 million minutes of video streamed globally (Airmeet Series B announcement / Inc42, February 2022). That is the turning point: a company built for a slow-burn structural shift instead got a compressed, forced global test of its product in a matter of weeks, and the growth numbers it posted through 2020-2021 were the direct result.

The money behind it

Airmeet has raised a reported $50 million in total across three disclosed institutional rounds (Inc42 and Businesswire, February 2022; Crunchbase News, September 2020):

• Seed, March 2020: $3 million, from Sequoia Capital India, Accel India, Venture Highway and Global Founders Capital.
• Series A, September 2020: $12 million, led by Sequoia Capital India and Redpoint Ventures, with Accel India, Venture Highway, Global Founders Capital and Gokul Rajaram also participating.
• Series B, February 2022: $35 million, led by Prosus Ventures and Sistema Asia Fund, with RingCentral Ventures, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, DG Daiwa Ventures, Nexxus Global and existing backers Sequoia Capital India and Accel India also in the round.

What each backer changed: Sequoia Capital India (rebranded Peak XV Partners in India in 2023) was the earliest and most consistent institutional investor, backing every round from seed through Series B and giving the founders credibility with later-stage global funds. Accel India likewise stayed in across all three rounds. Prosus Ventures, the venture arm of Naspers/Prosus, led the Series B and brought a strategic global-portfolio relationship: Prosus later profiled Airmeet as one of its portfolio “stories” (Naspers, November 2022), and Prosus-affiliated coverage continued to track the company through its 2023-2024 layoffs, describing it in headlines simply as “Prosus-backed Airmeet” (Inc42, 2023-2024). No valuation was disclosed for any round; tracking platforms including Crunchbase and PitchBook list Airmeet’s valuation as undisclosed as of this writing, and a single third-party estimate of roughly $141 million found during research (Getlatka) could not be corroborated against a second independent source, so it is not used here.

How it makes money

Airmeet is a subscription SaaS business that charges by event capacity rather than by number of events. Its own pricing page and third-party software directories describe the model as follows (Airmeet pricing page and Capterra/Outmano listings, accessed September 2026, company-stated):

• Attendee-based pricing: plans are priced on the maximum number of attendees allowed at any single event, not on how many events a customer runs; customers can run unlimited events within that cap.
• Self-serve tier (“Premium Webinars”): the only publicly listed price point, aimed at smaller-scale, self-service webinar hosts.
• Mid-market/enterprise tier (“Events”): for larger, scaled conferences; priced on a custom quote.
• Managed Events: a fully outsourced production service where Airmeet’s own team runs the event for the customer, also custom-quoted.
• Overage billing: on paid plans, attendees who exceed the purchased cap mid-event are still let in, with the overage billed after the event.

Where the margin sits: this is a live, real-time product, so the direct cost of goods is video infrastructure and bandwidth at the scale of the largest concurrent events (Airmeet has advertised support for up to 100,000 participants in a single event), plus the people cost of the Managed Events service line, which is production-labour-heavy rather than pure software margin. The part people get wrong is treating Airmeet like a video-conferencing tool with usage-based pricing similar to Zoom; it instead resembles an events-and-community platform, closer in structure to a ticketing or community-software business; the fee is tied to how big an audience a customer wants to reach in one sitting, not to minutes used or seats licensed.

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and profit after tax (PAT) for Airmeet Networks Private Limited, the Indian operating entity, as reported in its regulatory filings and compiled by corporate-data platforms Tracxn and Sensibook (both accessed September 2026); unit is ₹ crore.

• FY22 to FY23: revenue rose about 26% and PAT rose about 84%, the last full year of pandemic-era demand still flowing through the books (Inc42, citing FY22 filings, May 2023; Sensibook FY23 filing data, accessed September 2026).
• FY23 to FY24: revenue fell roughly 43%, and PAT fell roughly 40%, coinciding with the first two rounds of layoffs (Sensibook and Tracxn filing data, accessed September 2026).
• FY24 to FY25: revenue fell a further 44.1% and PAT fell 43.4%, coinciding with the third, engineering-heavy round of layoffs and the announced pivot away from the core events product (Tracxn filing data, accessed September 2026).
• Notable: the company has stayed profitable on paper in every disclosed fiscal year from FY21 through FY25, even as revenue nearly halved twice in a row, which points to cost-cutting (headcount reductions in particular) roughly tracking the top-line decline.

Where the money comes from

Airmeet does not publish a revenue split by geography or product line, so the picture here is built from its disclosed customer segments and named accounts rather than exact percentages:

• By customer segment: Airmeet markets itself across small business, mid-market and enterprise tiers, with G2 naming it a “Leader” for both the Enterprise and Mid-Market segments in its Winter 2025 grid, and giving it awards for Easiest Setup (Enterprise), Most Implementable (Mid-Market) and Best Support (Enterprise) (G2, accessed September 2026).
• By industry: G2 lists education, non-profit organisation management and events services among Airmeet’s most active user industries (G2, accessed September 2026).
• By named accounts, pandemic-era (2022): Flipkart, University College London, Rotman School of Management and ViacomCBS were cited in Series B materials, alongside a claim of 5,500+ brands using the platform (Inc42/Businesswire, February 2022); by November 2022, Prosus’s own portfolio profile cited 6,500+ brands monthly and 120,000+ organisers cumulatively (Naspers, November 2022).
• By named accounts, current: Airmeet’s own site now cites 2,500+ brands, including Walmart, Volvo, Accenture, HackerRank and the University of Toronto (company website, accessed September 2026, company-stated) — roughly a third of the brand count it claimed at the pandemic peak, consistent with the broader demand pullback described above.
• The surprise: an India-founded, India-headquartered engineering team sells overwhelmingly to large global enterprise and education brands rather than to Indian small businesses; the product’s named customer list, in every year checked, skews toward US and UK institutions and multinationals, not the domestic market.

The risks

• Category commoditization, company-disclosed: CEO Lalit Mangal has twice, on the record, cited the virtual-events category becoming commoditized as a direct driver of layoffs (Inc42, May 2023 and March 2024) — the mechanism is that once dozens of vendors (Zoom Events, RingCentral Events, Hopin’s successors, Hubilo and others) offer broadly similar video-and-breakout-room functionality, pricing power and differentiation both erode.
• Demand-cliff precedent in the same category: rival Hopin raised roughly $1 billion and was valued at $7.75 billion at its August 2021 peak, then sold its core events and engagement products to RingCentral for $15 million upfront (with up to $35 million contingent) in August 2023, as in-person events returned and pandemic-era virtual-event budgets dried up (TechCrunch, August 2023; Axios, August 2023). Airmeet’s revenue decline over FY24-FY25 tracks the same industry-wide reversal, at a smaller scale and without the same valuation collapse being publicly disclosed.
• Execution risk on the AI pivot: in September 2024, Airmeet said it would stop upgrading its existing event-management product and redirect toward new AI-powered features, while simultaneously cutting 80% of the engineering team that would need to build that new product (Inc42, September 2024) — betting a strategic pivot on a much smaller team than the one that built the original platform is a disclosed, mechanical risk, not a hypothetical one.

The takeaway

Airmeet’s arc is a reminder that a demand shock is not the same thing as a market. The pandemic did not create a durable new category of virtual-first events at the scale it appeared to in 2020 and 2021; it pulled forward years of hesitant adoption into eighteen months, and then handed the bill back once travel and in-person budgets returned. A company that grows 24 times in a year on the back of a global forcing function has to plan, from month one of that growth, for the version of its market that exists after the forcing function ends — because the same features that make a product a perfect fit for a crisis (fast onboarding, low switching cost, broad horizontal appeal) are exactly the features that make it easy for competitors to commoditize once the crisis passes. The lesson transfers well beyond events software: any business whose growth curve is explained by an external shock owes itself an honest, early answer to what its numbers look like once that shock is gone.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Airmeet and when?

Airmeet was founded in Bengaluru in June 2019 (incorporated 19 September 2019) by Lalit Mangal, Manoj Kumar Singh and Vinay Kumar Jaasti; Mangal is CEO and Jaasti is CTO. Mangal had previously co-founded CommonFloor, sold to Quikr in a deal announced in January 2016.

How much funding has Airmeet raised, and who backed it?

Airmeet has raised a reported $50 million across three disclosed institutional rounds: a $3 million seed (March 2020), a $12 million Series A (September 2020) and a $35 million Series B (February 2022). Lead and repeat backers include Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners), Accel India and, from the Series B, Prosus Ventures.

What is Airmeet’s current valuation?

Not publicly disclosed. No round since the February 2022 Series B has been announced, and tracking platforms including Crunchbase and PitchBook list the valuation as undisclosed as of this writing.

Why did Airmeet lay off staff repeatedly in 2023 and 2024?

CEO Lalit Mangal attributed the cuts to a post-pandemic collapse in virtual-event marketing budgets and rapid commoditization of the category (May 2023), followed by a shift of resources from R&D to go-to-market (March 2024), and finally a decision to stop upgrading the core events product and pivot toward AI-powered features while cutting 80% of the engineering team (September 2024).

Is Airmeet profitable?

Yes, on a net-profit basis in every disclosed fiscal year from FY21 through FY25, according to filings for its Indian operating entity, Airmeet Networks Private Limited — but profit has fallen alongside a steep revenue decline, from ₹95.69 crore in FY23 to ₹30.56 crore in FY25.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Inc42, “Event Tech Startup Airmeet Raises $35 Mn From Prosus, Sistema Asia Fund; Plans Global Expansion,” February 2022
• Businesswire, “Event-led Engagement Platform Airmeet Raises $35M USD Series B From Prosus Ventures, Sistema, Sequoia Capital India, RingCentral Ventures, and Others,” February 2022
• Crunchbase News, “Sequoia, Redpoint-led $12M Series A Will Help Airmeet Expand Globally,” September 2020
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Prosus-Backed Airmeet Lays Off 30% of Its Workforce,” May 2023
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Airmeet Lays Off 20% Workforce In Second Restructuring Exercise Within A Year,” March 2024
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Prosus-Backed Airmeet Undertakes Another Restructuring Exercise, Fires 80% Tech Team,” September 2024
• Naspers, “Meet Airmeet, enabling hybrid events and social webinars with its industry-first ‘event experience cloud’,” November 2022
• Tracxn, Airmeet company profile and funding data, accessed September 2026
• Sensibook, Airmeet Networks Private Limited company and financial profile, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Quikr Finally Acquires CommonFloor,” January 2016
• Wikipedia, “Commonfloor,” accessed September 2026
• TechCrunch, “Hopin, the struggling virtual conference unicorn, sells events and engagement units to RingCentral,” August 2023
• Axios, “Hopin, once valued at $7.6 billion, makes some major changes,” August 2023
• Wikipedia, “Hopin (company),” accessed September 2026
• G2, Airmeet product page and Winter 2025 grid badges, accessed September 2026
• Airmeet, official pricing page, accessed September 2026

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