Beekast, a Moroccan mobile and web meeting and events app, has raised 2.7 million euro ($3 million) led by Isource, a VC with a 200 million euro ($221 million) fund.

Other investors in the round included individuals in the Paris Business Angels and Val'Angels networks.

Founded in 2014 by Said El Haddati, Chabli Yassine, and their French partner Quentin Georget, Beekast’s app provides interactive tools to make smartphones, tablets and PCs, assets for productivity.

Long monologues, difficulties to manage speaking, shyness, boredom and distractions stand as the main issues for most of meetings, trainings and seminars.

According to Beekast around 80 percent of the audience does something else on their smartphones during a presentation.

The app’s features allow brainstorming, polls, surveys, classification proposals, group or private messaging, statistics, automatic reporting, networking abilities, knowledge tests, and sharing on social networks.

"Our goal is to support our development in France and abroad in order to become the first reference on the market for collaborative solutions," said CEO Chabli.

The startup bills its service according to the number of meeting entrants. It is free for events of less than 30 people, and then charges for larger groups.

"We focused on interactivity in real time [...] and we paid special attention to the UX - user-experience in order to adapt the application to the public. Another important point is that our application is 100 percent customizable via an ergonomic customer space," said El Haddati, customer happiness officer.

These arguments convinced more than 300 customers to adopt their solution, including Google, Microsoft, EY, DHL and Johnson & Johnson.

Isource partner Nicolas Boulay said the commercial potential of the application was undeniable.

"Beekast provides an intuitive solution for good meetings. [...] It is an effective tool that will become essential for all,” he said.

Prior to his first fundraiser, Beekast received grants from BPI and Scientipôle and was supported by incubators including the Microsoft Accelerator.

This route enabled the three cofounders to better structure their business model and attract investor interest.

A market full of promises

They’re aiming for revenue of 50 million euros ($55 million) in 2020 and they want to achieve most of it abroad, a market that currently represents less than 10 percent of the total turnover of the startup.

"We will recruit 50 employees between January 2017 and June 2018. We will strengthen the R&D team and we will focus the most on the 'customer success' and marketing," El Haddati told Wamda. "Our goal is to have 100 percent customers who are also ambassadors or at least, fans.”

His words illustrate the famous credo of the startup world: speed of execution.

The success of Beekast is mostly based on its ability to acquire and retain new users and to quickly position itself on an emerging market where no clear leader has yet emerged.

Feature image via Maddyness.