Startup Spotlight #25: Automating a Trillion-dollar Market
Today's featured startup is bringing the corporate events sector a little bit closer to the future. But how?
Project Overview
Nowadays has developed an AI assistant to help organize corporate events locally, nationally, or even internationally.
The platform boasts a database of over 400,000 venues for events of various scales. Clients provide the dates, requirements, and preferences for the event, and the AI assistant identifies suitable options. It then sends inquiries to venues, requesting availability and detailed pricing for services such as venue rental, participant accommodation, catering, transportation, guided tours, and more.
Importantly, Nowadays is an authorized travel agency under the International Air Transport Association (IATA), enabling it to manage travel arrangements directly.
Nowadays’ AI assistant doesn’t just send inquiries — it also follows up on unanswered requests with reminders or phone calls and negotiates prices by referencing competitors’ rates for similar services. Its primary objective is to create a comprehensive comparative table of options, helping clients make well-informed and cost-effective decisions.
The service charges a 15% fee based on the total cost of booked services and is geared toward organizing events with budgets starting at $20,000.
Launched last summer during its acceptance into Y Combinator and securing $500,000 in initial funding, Nowadays has since helped companies like Google, Stripe, and Notion organize events with a total budget of $4 million. Recently, the startup raised an additional $2 million to expand its operations.
What’s the Gist?
While the corporate event market might initially seem like a niche area, it’s actually a massive and rapidly growing sector.
In 2017, it was valued at $300 billion globally, with projections indicating growth to $1.2 trillion by 2032. In the U.S. alone, 1.8 million events (including conferences, exhibitions, and other gatherings) take place annually, with a combined budget of about $400 billion.
Corporate events are just one segment of this market and often exclude smaller-scale events such as internal team-building exercises, board meetings, or company celebrations, which frequently exceed the $20,000 budget threshold set by Nowadays. These smaller events, while overlooked in broader market analyses, represent a significant opportunity due to their volume and frequency.
The industry’s size also extends to the labor force. In 2022, the U.S. counted 135,000 professional event organizers, many of whom perform tasks that Nowadays’ AI can now automate — such as vendor outreach, negotiation, and coordination.
Beyond its current scope, the corporate event market is fueled by key trends that are reshaping demand:
1. Remote work creating a need for in-person connection: The rise of remote teams has increased the demand for team-building retreats, leadership summits, and strategy offsites to enhance collaboration and alignment.
2. Influencer-driven offline events: Influencers are transforming digital communities into physical ones by hosting meetups and gatherings that foster stronger bonds among their audiences.
3. Gen Z’s return to offline socialization: Gen Z’s preference for face-to-face interaction is driving a surge in local gatherings, where participants seek more personal and meaningful social experiences.
The growing demand for corporate event solutions has attracted other startups, highlighting the market’s potential. For example:
• TeamOut raised $3.2 million to organize events for remote teams, with a specific focus on small-scale offline gatherings.
• Bizly, which secured $25.3 million, supports event planners with tools for venue booking, registration, and logistics management.
What’s more, the corporate event market is no longer confined to companies. The growing trend of influencers hosting events for their followers — to foster community and drive engagement — has created new avenues for innovation. Startups like River, which raised $1.56 million, help influencers connect with local organizers for such events. Similarly, POSH offers a turnkey platform for organizing small-scale, localized events, with features like venue booking, catering, and security.
These examples demonstrate that the market for event organization — be it corporate, community-based, or influencer-driven — is vast and still evolving. Events like banquets and milestone celebrations often exceed the budgets of traditional corporate gatherings, further expanding the scope of this industry.
Key Takeaways
The offline corporate events market is already significant and continues to grow, even through organic factors. This growth is further accelerated by new trends:
• Remote work has made it essential for leaders of distributed teams to organize offline meetups and retreats for synchronization and team-building.
• Online influencers have started hosting offline events to strengthen and grow their follower communities.
• Gen Z’s desire for offline socialization is driving an increase in the number of local offline gatherings.
However, organizing any event can be an incredibly tedious process filled with repetitive tasks: sending inquiries, receiving no response, making calls, calling again, comparing options, negotiating, sending reminders, double-checking, following up again — and the list goes on.
AI can now handle much of this workload, making event organization at any scale and in any location simpler, faster, and cheaper than ever before. This reduction in cost applies not only to organizing the event but also to the event itself, as AI allows for broader comparisons and better price negotiations.
The natural progression in this space is the development of platforms dedicated to offline event organization. Their key feature would be an AI assistant that manages routine planning tasks, vendor searches, price negotiations, reminders, and all the other burdensome details.
Such platforms will probably end up focusing on niche areas: some might specialize in organizing small local events in specific cities, others in arranging offline meetups for followers of online influencers, corporate team-building activities, or even large-scale banquets, weddings, and milestone celebrations, whose budgets often exceed those of typical corporate events.
Interestingly, the idea for Nowadays came to its founder when she was organizing a corporate event at her previous company. She struggled to get quotes and terms from ice cream truck vendors and eventually had to source food herself from local eateries because it couldn’t be ordered directly.
This experience revealed a broader issue: the service market remains primitive compared to the product market. But this won’t last forever — the service market will inevitably be digitized and streamlined, just like the product market.
In this context, modern platforms that simplify event organization align with a larger trend: the digitalization of the service industry. This transformation is a natural next step. Which service market do you think should be digitized first?
Company info
Nowadays
Website: https://www.getnowadays.com/
Last funding round: $2 million, 06.12.2024
Total funds raised: $2.5 million over 2 rounds