Vendelux knows which event you should attend next

Using AI to gather data, this startup aims to make in-person events more effective for attendees

It seems like only yesterday the world stood still as Covid-19 plagued people’s homes and shut the doors of offices, gyms, cinemas, malls, and other venues. But today, humanity is on its feet again, hungry for offline social presence after virtual meetups in isolation. And one company aims to revamp the event-going experience with AI.

It was in mid-pandemic when two Shutterstock execs quit to launch their new venture, Vendelux, for in-person event marketing. Now, as offline events gather crowds again, the startup celebrates its Series A round of funding.

The New York City startup raised $14 million in new capital, as announced last week. Leading the round was FirstMark Capital, a NYC investor in Shopify, Pinterest, and Airbnb. Early stage fund Cervin Ventures, based in Palo Alto, also participated, as did event organizers of health tech’s HLTH, ShopTalk, Money20/20’s Jonathan Weiner, Manifest, Blueprint’s Jay Weintraub, and SaaStock’s Alex Theuma.

“It’s been a wild ride!” Alex Reynolds, who co-founded Vendelux with Stefan Deeran, said in a statement last week.

“In two years, we’ve brought together an incredible team of world-class builders, created a community of over 5,000 active event marketers, and identified over 10 million net new qualified event leads for our growing customers,” Reynolds said.

Vendelux positions itself as a software platform for event marketers, built by event marketers. Using AI and predictive modeling, the platform pulls data from its network of partners and organizers, as well as from public sources like social media to forecast which important people, such as speakers, sponsors, and competitors, will attend which events – worldwide. This allows its clients to make data-driven decisions on which conferences or trade shows to attend or sponsor.

And Vendelux has been growing fast, having doubled its customer base and tripled its annual recurring revenue from last year. Among its clients are payments platform PayPal, database manager MongoDB, cybersecurity firm Okta, and T-Mobile. According to its website, the startup now counts 100+ event organizer partners and 1,200+ community members. Vendelux is also growing overseas and was recently hiring for its new London location.

The recent round bumped Vendelux’s total funds raised to $16.4 million. International growth and team expansion is what Vendelux will invest in with new capital, plus the company said it continues to improve its product across the event marketing lifecycle – “from discovering the most relevant events to measuring ROI down to the dollar by event, by sales rep, by year.”

“This funding allows us to build and scale our platform to help marketers drive more value from events, and identify a clear link between their actions and increases in qualified leads, conversion, and revenue,” CEO Reynolds said in a release.

Vendelux offers several pricing plans: paid plans for sales, marketers, organizers and enterprises; plus a free personal plan “for networking newbies.” For event organizers, Vendelux promotes building and audience of relevant exhibitors, speakers, and attendees. For marketers, the company offers relevant AI recommendations on which events to travel to, building better strategy, managing costs and generating ROI with its event planner, and creating prospect lists to meet more people, reducing the time and resources otherwise needed for research.

According to Reynolds, “In-person networking matters more than ever, and we are proud to deliver a software platform for the specific needs of event professionals everywhere!”