Event technology is continuing to evolve at record speed, with new tools and platforms significantly improving the experience for organizers and attendees. Here are some of the most recent developments. 

Hubilo

Virtual event platform Hubilo has secured $125 million in Series B funding from Alkeon Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital, bringing the company’s total funding to $153 million. The new investment will allow Hubilo to expand its global footprint, build out new functionalities and deliver on its product vision for the future of events. 

“The potential ahead of us with this investment is massive,” said Vaibhav Jain, CEO and founder of Hubilo. “What we’ve learned over the last six years is that an intuitive platform is just table stakes. Our commitment to event organizers is that we will always provide a dedicated event team to ensure flawless execution of every event.”

With the new funding, Hubilo plans to advance innovation of its platform, strengthen its product, engineering and design teams in India and bolster its go-to-market teams in the U.S., U.K., Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific region. The company also plans to set up new sales offices in key regions to expand its operations and reach a greater volume of customers. In addition, Hubilo will increase its overall employee count by 150% to support its rapid growth plans and to respond to the increased customer demand for virtual and hybrid events.

Delegate Connect

Event platform Delegate Connect raised $10 million in seed capital, which it plans to use to fuel international growth and enhance its products. 

Aside from adding employees in its Melbourne, London and Norway offices and opening an office in the U.S., the company will further augment the hybrid and virtual event experience on the platform. The platform offers features such as automatic tracking and accreditation of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points, as well as the ability to run unlimited concurrent streams of content. 

“We have clients around the world who love using our platform because it is built to solve the exact problems they are faced with,” said Jordan Walsh, co-founder and CEO of Delegate Connect. “We are so excited to share some of the world-first features that we will be launching over the coming months.”

Delegate Connect’s all-in-one platform is designed to handle large and complex virtual and hybrid events at scale, with a focus on the medical, pharmaceutical, industry association and corporate sectors. It is built to service unlimited delegates, sponsors and exhibitors and can be accessed on any device, from anywhere in the world. The entire platform is available in multiple languages, and provides sophisticated networking capabilities, sponsor and exhibitor interaction, detailed analytics and reporting functionality, along with post-event video on-demand hosting.

Aventri 

Event management software company Aventri recently launched Express Events to streamline setup and delivery of simple, straightforward events.

The solution enables organizations to handle their entire portfolio of events—from small virtual trainings to large hybrid conferences and in-person trade shows—on one platform.

Express Events was designed to make it easy for organizations with downsized planning teams to run comprehensive programs, with one platform that supports staff at every level of expertise, from beginners to the most advanced pros. 

Planners and attendees can save time and effort with Express Events through the following features:

• Express setup lets planners create an event in minutes, with five simple clicks. The new tool asks a set of questions to determine high-level requirements and then scales back the setup to fit event needs.
• Real-time activity dashboards show planners how far along they are in the planning process and the exact steps they still need to complete. Real-time metrics on email opens, clicks, registrations, attendance and more help ensure success at each step.
• Templates help planners create stunning events right out of the box. Templates are designed for different event types. Planners pick a theme and provide event details. Express Events does the rest, producing invitations, registration forms, emails, landing pages and more. With no need to load images, compose emails, deal with merge codes, design color palettes and other tasks, first-time planners can create professional events while cutting planning time in half.
• New RSVP functionality powers instant registration. Registrants do not need to spend time entering information the event organizer already has in the system. They can register for a standard internal event with one click.

Express Events provides better insights and significant savings, according to Steve Yellen, vice president of product strategy for Aventri, since companies don’t have to invest in multiple tools, manage different contracts and vendors, or struggle with tools that don’t work in sync.

“Express Events enables organizations to aggregate data from events of all sizes in one system,” Yellen said. “Companies get a comprehensive view of their meeting spend and return on investment, and at the same time, they realize monetary and operational savings.”

Swapcard

Swapcard, an all-in-one event and community platform powered by artificial intelligence, recently launched SwapAccess, a hybrid event session scanning tool to track and control online and onsite attendee access and behavior that works both online and offline.

The phone and tablet app provides event planners with an all-in-one registration and session access solution for hybrid events. The app solves the problem event planners have of relying on multiple platforms to organize and track session attendance, which often leads to confusion and data-mismanagement.

SwapAccess allows event organizers to track session attendance and control access for both online and in-person participants with one central, secure database. This eliminates the need for multiple event management solutions and human labor. 

Swapcard is on a mission to make the industry more data-driven, and SwapAccess has been built for the modern event planner in every possible setting, according to Baptiste Boulard, CEO and co-founder of Swapcard.

“Clients already value the fact we use artificial intelligence to boost engagement, and they now understand why it’s crucial to capture participant behavior,” Boulard said. “By tracking more participant data, event organizers can better measure the value they provide to delegates.”

The simplified, unified solution is designed to help organizers easily run their access control on event days and also collect important session attendance information that can’t be found anywhere else. 

Key benefits of SwapAccess include:

• Access control. Allows event organizers to restrict session attendance to the appropriate ticket holders.
• Instant feedback. Organizers can present attendees with real-time surveys as they exit the session.
• Attendee experience. Organizers can separate attendees into different breakout groups, and attendees are signed up automatically for sessions when they sign in.
• Audience behavior. Organizers have insight into how long people attend a session.

SwapAccess is best used in conjunction with the Swapcard event platform, which will allow alerts and notifications to be triggered in the event app and help organizers, speakers and sponsors keep track of their event schedules.

Chili Piper

Chili Piper, an inbound conversion platform for sales and marketing teams, recently launched of Chili Events, new technology that will automatically schedule, coordinate and track in-person meetings at conferences and trade shows.

The all-in-one event meetings management solution is designed to generate more meetings and maximize ROI from in-person conferences and trade shows. 

“In-person events are hugely important for B2B revenue teams,” said Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO and co-founder of Chili Piper. “With Chili Events, we’re making it possible for marketing and sales to not just automate booking conference and trade show meetings with key prospects and customers, but to treat those meetings like any other digital touchpoint in the customer journey, with quantifiable results and data.” 

Highlights of the Chili Events platform that streamline meetings include:

• URL to pre-book meetings. Make meeting scheduling easier than ever with event-specific links that any team member can share over email or via ad campaigns.
• Manage meeting space availability. Automatically coordinate availability across designated meeting spaces to finally eliminate double-booking.
• Placeholder calendars. Capture all meetings in a single calendar that can be distributed later based on which team members will attend an event.
• Automate reminders and rescheduling. Intelligently and automatically communicate over email and SMS to help dramatically reduce meeting no-shows.
• All-in-one event management dashboard. An intuitive dashboard to see exactly which meetings are happening each day and track attendance.
• Calendar Integrations. Integrate directly with GSuite and Outlook365 to coordinate calendars in real time.
• Track everything in your CRM. Automatically track check-ins and no-shows while keeping everything synced with the event campaign in Salesforce.

Chili Piper was designed as an advanced routing and scheduling software for B2B revenue teams. It automatically qualifies, routes and connects inbound leads, while enabling a fast and error-free marketing-to-sales handoff. 

42Chat 

42Chat, which provides conversational artificial intelligence chatbots for events and other business environments, created HealthShield, a health screening solution for event organizers and attendees. 

“For events, it all starts with doing everything reasonable to protect attendees, exhibitors, staffers and venue teams,” said Robert Caldwell, founding partner of 42Chat.

HealthShield, which won IAEE’s Most Innovative Business Solution Award, is a simple, text messaging-based COVID-19 screening and vaccination verification tool that helps to ensure 100% attendee compliance well before arriving onsite.

Attendees receive a text message and can send a text or scan a QR code to upload their documentation. Once verified, attendees receive a text message or email with a confirmation to be shown when they arrive onsite to reduce lines and streamline logistics.

Reminder text messages can be scheduled leading up to the event for those that have not been verified, and immediate text messages can be sent to reach all attendees in case of an emergency onsite.

42Chat is a market leader in deep conversational bots for live events. The company aims to revolutionize the attendee experience by providing 24/7 interaction and engagement via SMS, Messenger, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and other messaging platforms.

Photo: Aventri's Express Events

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