3DTLC had the chance to speak with InXpo's CEO, Malcolm Lotzof, about how the company will use the recent $9-million in first-round funding it received from Highland Capital Partners. Moving forward, the core product - virtual events delivery - will remain, but InXpo will see a significant increase in staffing and will search out partnerships.
"When we started in the business of virtual shows and saw the economies of scale," he said, "we felt it was a great target market to start with. Now it includes all kinds of virtual events – sales meetings, partner meetings, human resource releases - and now, people are keeping them open 365 days a year and they are becoming more like virtual communities. Yes, the core product is the same, but the markets that it addresses keep expanding."
Lotzof outlined how the virtual events company, which has been self-funded up to this point. will expand. The funding will be funneled into three distinct areas: hardware, human resources, and partnerships.
As the reach of virtual events continues to grow, InXpo wants to make sure that its hardware infrastructure can handle the forthcoming increased capacity.
"We use scalable architecture, but we needed to bump up the capacity three to four times to deal with the increase in demand," Lotzof said. He noted that opening up remote data centers will ensure the seamless delivery of virtual events.
Secondly, InXpo intends to "double the company size," according to Lotzof. The staff count currently sits at 100, but the CEO would like to see a significant increase over the next year.
"We're aggressively hiring," he said, "in all areas - sales, development, support, and production."
Thirdly, InXpo would like to create sustained partnerships with collaborators.
"Part of the plan is to build a very sophistocated channel partner program – for example, what we have with George P. Johnson – and we see ourselves working more with agencies. That’s the thrust of how we become more scalable. The demand is elastic, there is no limit, and channel partnerships are how to scale the organization to meet that demand."
InXpo's product relies on a realistic virtual environment, which will not change anytime soon.
"For our avatars, we like a photograph or a video. To me, the ideal is a video where you can see people and get that face-to-face kind of connection," he said. "We believe we are more about business and our application is focused on highlighting the individual. We’re going after the business person. We try to use the graphical representation of physical places, because you have 20,000 people arriving at an event, and they have to know what to do immediately."
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