As anyone who went to Cannes Lions last month knows, the appetite for in-person gatherings is going strong. Vendelux, a live events information platform, has raised $50 million to help marketers capitalize on that.
Tribeca Venture Partners led the company’s Series B raise, with S3, Pelion Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, FirstMark, and Cervin Ventures also participating, Business Insider exclusively learned. It’s raised $71 million to date, including a $14 million Series A round in 2023.
Vendelux uses AI and proprietary event data from over 250,000 events globally to help B2B brands determine which events to attend and coordinate meetings on the ground. It plugs into a user’s customer relationship management system to demonstrate the effectiveness of events by tracking whether attending a given dinner or happy hour actually paid off in deal flow.
Vendelux said it has more than 250 customers, including Ramp, ElevenLabs, Vercel, Glean, GitLab, DocuSign, and Intel.
Vendelux was started in 2021 by two Shutterstock alums, Alex Reynolds and Stefan Deeran. Reynolds, the CEO, said the idea for the company grew out of their experience doing in-person meetings to secure deals with companies like OpenAI and Google.
“We found that when we went to the right event and met the right people, the stars aligned,” he said. “But if we went to the wrong event, or even if we went to a good event, but didn’t get face time with the right people, it was a huge waste of time and money.”
Up next, Reynolds said he sees room to grow by serving big companies that send a lot of people to events. He wants to increase the company’s marketing and bolster its tools that show ROI. Vendelux plans to roughly double its staff, now 85, this year.
“Anyone that wants to meet their customers and prospects in person can be a customer of ours, but the biggest area of opportunity is really with the enterprise,” Reynolds said. “Every Fortune 500 company should be a customer.”
Big money is flowing into live events
Live B2B events have been on the rise since the pandemic lockdown ended. Private equity has been moving into the space. Consumer live-events company stocks have performed well, too.
Reynolds said global conflict has had some dampening effect on certain B2B events, but that, for the most part, interest in face-to-face gatherings remained high.
On average, organizations spend more than one-fourth of their marketing program budgets on events, according to a first-quarter Forrester survey of 654 marketing decision-makers. Reynolds said he has seen event budgets face more scrutiny, though.
Vendelux faces competition from companies like Jifflenow and Chili Piper, which offer meeting-booking tools, though Reynolds says his startup provides a layer of information rivals don’t.
“As people are really trying to figure out where their marketing dollars should go, there’s more pressure to be able to show that ROI,” he said. “We hear from marketing leaders that they really need to be able to show the output that’s coming from these events in order to continue to invest more in the channel.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post This startup raised $50 million to help marketers figure out which events are actually worth attending appeared first on Business Insider.
