Skift Take
Amid the buzz of in-person event resurgence, Vendelux’s ambitious event intelligence trajectory raises eyebrows as it secures a hefty $14 million in Series A funding led by FirstMark Capital.
The platform’s central promise is to take the guesswork out of marketing business events. It aims to help event marketers predict their return on investment from attending or sponsoring events.
“Events are the most important piece of the marketing and sales funnel, but it’s not always clear which events deliver the greatest return on dollars spent. With teams operating off of different metrics – meetings, deals, speaking opportunities, etc. – it’s no wonder the success is so difficult to define,” said the company’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Reynolds.
The event intelligence company previously raised a seed round in January 2022. This round of funding included the participation of Cervin Ventures. Founders of successful business events such as HLTH, ShopTalk, Money20/20, Manifest, Blueprint, and SaaStock are also part of the round. The company boasts mainly tech-focused enterprise customers, including PayPal, MongoDB, Calendly, and T-Mobile.
Unlocking Event Intelligence
Vendelux is the brainchild of two ex-Shutterstock executives. It boasts an AI-powered and predictive modeling platform flaunting staggering figures: 65 million data points over 160,000 global events. According to the company, this allows it to analyze customer and competitor behavior. It can then calculate the potential return on investment of any business event. The offering also includes providing users with enriched contacts, including email addresses.
The Startup Journey
Vendelux’s inception coincided with a precarious pivot in the event industry as virtual conferences gained momentary traction. While companies like Hopin saw ephemeral glory, Vendelux bet on the in-person comeback. Their gamble on event intelligence seems to have paid off. The company doubled its customers and saw a tripling of annual revenue over the past year.
“Year after year, [co-founder] Stefan and I saw firsthand the challenges of evaluating which events were worthwhile to attend or invest in. We built Vendelux to solve those very challenges,” said Reynolds.
In an industry susceptible to the whims of the economy, technological innovation, and shifts in marketing paradigms, Vendelux’s vision for the future of event marketing is audacious. The company is betting that the end of cookies will raise its appeal. The impact on event marketing is already being felt, with event organizers looking for new ways of marketing their events.
“The Vendelux team is defining a new category in event intelligence. Their customers’ success with the product demonstrates what is possible when you introduce robust data infrastructure to a critical customer acquisition channel for the first time,” said Amish Jani, founder and partner, FirstMark Capital. “Vendelux is accelerating at the exact right moment, seizing the best of artificial intelligence’s capabilities to deliver data-driven insights that don’t exist anywhere else.”
With this funding, Vendelux plans to double its staff and establish a London team to grow its European customer base. It is confident that its GDPR-compliant insights will be hit for marketers working under the EU’s tight data privacy laws.