VirBELA sees 260% pop in Q2 revenue amid work from home surge

Glenn Sanford, eXp World Holdings CEO & VirBELA Chief Strategy Officer, joins Yahoo Finance's Zack Guzman to discuss the VirBELA's Q2 growth as more Americans continue to work from home.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: And we want to spotlight one of the startups that we brought to you a few months ago with a profile there. That would be the virtual reality startup known as VirBELA, allowing people to connect in a virtual world, something that a lot of not just employees, but friends out there have been looking to do, as we've shifted to socially-distanced life here in 2020. And the parent company of VirBELA, worth noting here, is up more than 100% in just the last month and perhaps no surprise when you think about the uptick here in VirBELA technology, seeing a 260% increase in revenue in Q2 of 2020 compared to last year and a more than five times increase in monthly active users as well.

So here to discuss all of that growth with us is the CEO of eXp World Holdings, as well as VirBELA's chief strategy offer-- officer, I should say-- Glenn Sanford joins us now as well. And Glenn, I just want to get into the growth you've seen because it's incredible. But we spotlighted you guys, and I tested out the technology so not exactly surprising to me. But how crazy has it been for you running this company?

GLENN SANFORD: Yeah, it's been really crazy. You know, in March, I went and actually joined the VirBELA team because we could see that they were needing to scale. And we had, of course, scaled our real estate brokerage dramatically over the last 10 years. And so we've added probably five times the headcount.

We went from 20 plus-- 20 employees to over 105 employees. We've got recs out now for another 20 or so people just to keep up with the demand of the work-- virtual world for work platform. So it's been a really fast-- a rocket ride in a very short period of time.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I know. I mean, it's amazing to think about how short of a time you've seen that. But as I said, the stock up more than double in just the last month. But notably, I mean, you've added customers as well through all this. We highlighted some of those before-- Sanford, the Department of Defense, people who have been using this technology to connect in the pandemic. What have you seen since we had you on last, in terms of customers, whether it's more of those companies trying to hold meetings virtually or if it's more on the event side that we profiled as well, as a lot of conventions got canceled?

GLENN SANFORD: Yeah, so we've launched almost 30 private campuses. So these are generally organizations that want to have their own private space to actually have their employees. We've had some organizations that have as many as 30,000 employees, one of which doesn't want to name named yet. But they've got-- they're going to be putting 50% of their employees-- so about 15,000 of those employees will be working entirely through the virtual campus.

So we've got, you know, large employees-- employers. We've got events companies. HTC, we just announced a couple months back our partnership with them. They're pre-installing VirBELA on I think it's over a million PCs in China-- business-ready PCs so that people can go into to the VIVE campus and then potentially even from there get their own private campuses and team suites.

So we've got, you know, a lot of these great partnerships. Events has been huge. We've added concert stages. There's a company called Event Farm that we've partnered with. They've had three live concerts going on simultaneously in the same campus where people would go by avatar to concert to concert. We've introduced a live webcam and screen-sharing, so you can get a Zoom-like experience if you want to.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah.

GLENN SANFORD: But for the most part, people are using it as avatar to avatar.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah. And the other thing too here, obviously, the structure of all this-- I mean, that much growth, I imagine you'd be wanting to invest. And clearly, as you talked about on the employment front here, adding 85 new employee since the start of the year, that's a lot of growth on that front. But when we think about funding all this as well, obviously, VirBELA is a part of eXp World Holdings, a publicly-traded company here.

But do you ever grapple with the idea of spinning VirBELA off as its own company? We've seen a lot of SPACs here. I imagine, in this pandemic, we've seen some valuations just completely skyrocket for any company attached to the virtual connection space. Is that something you'd potentially consider here?

GLENN SANFORD: Yeah. In fact, you know, we've had conversations. Obviously, you know, real estate brokers and a virtual business platform are two disparate types of business models, so different types of investors and shareholders. And so we've been looking at, you know, what can we do with it. We've had a number of people approach us, asking to actually participate on the VirBELA side. So it's something, actually, we're actively looking at.

ZACK GUZMAN: All right, very interesting. I mean, time-- when you say actively looking, this is something I got to press here because it would be big to see happen. I mean, what's the timeline that you'd want to see it happen, just because I imagine it would be an overnight success in the market, when we think about it?

GLENN SANFORD: Yeah, you know, we're-- well, I can just say, and given that this is-- that we've conversations, you know, we're probably talking, you know, six to nine months to be able to build all of that out, if we go that direction. Certainly, I'm the largest single shareholder. So just from that perspective, I'd love to have a share of VirBELA and a share of eXp. I think they're nice, you know, for me, as- just a personal shareholder. But you know, we'll see where it goes, but that would be the timeframe we'd be looking at.

ZACK GUZMAN: All right, very interesting stuff there and an explosive growth, as we highlighted here, at VirBELA. Glenn Sanford, appreciate you taking the time to chat.

GLENN SANFORD: Thanks, Zack.