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The meetings booking-and-management platform Groupize has acquired the Vendry, a marketplace of around 70,000 event vendors and venues. That portfolio will be added to the existing Groupize booking engine of some 190,000 hotels globally. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Vendry's marketplace, which is used by more than 150,000 event planners each month, according to Groupize, will be known as the Vendry by Groupize. The integration into the Groupize platform will be complete by year's end, the company noted. The Vendry founder Daphne Hoppenot is joining the Groupize executive team as a strategic advisor, and additional Vendry team members have joined the company, as well.
"We will integrate the Vendry's collection of venues and vendors in our enterprise solution as the exclusive venue/vendor selection for our global customer base," explained Groupize CEO Alisa de Gaspe Beaubien. "These are companies that use Groupize for enterprise meeting management and average at least 100 meetings per year."
The addition of that marketplace will provide Groupize customers with the opportunity to source unique venues for off-sites, day meetings, dining events, cocktail parties and such, complementing the robust functionality already offered in Groupize — which includes group hotel bookings, attendee management and travel logistics. Both companies have largely focused on the corporate-planner market.
"Over the past several months, as we’ve gotten to know the Groupize team, I’ve consistently walked away from our conversations believing that I finally found a company that felt just as passionate as our team about supporting corporate meeting and event planners with better technology to help them bring people together," said Hoppenot. "We’re thrilled to be taking this important step forward with them in an effort to bring our shared platforms and visions together."
Marketplace acquisition trending
The deal comes just a month after event-tech giant Cvent acquired Reposite, an AI-powered sourcing platform that will be used to power the Cvent Vendor Marketplace. Reposite has a more varied collection of event categories among its 35,000 vendors, including transportation, restaurants, entertainment, staffing and gifting — but the interest driving marketplace expansion has a similar end goal, that of allowing customers to source more event needs within one meetings-management platform. (Cvent's 2018 acquisition of Kapow, a platform for booking unique venues and packaged event experiences, also serves as a point of comparison.)
"We’re excited to bring this innovative technology into the Groupize platform, accelerating our mission to transform the way meetings and events are managed," noted de Gaspe Beaubien about The Vendry deal. "This acquisition accelerates our timelines on delivering a global solution to plan and manage exceptional meeting and event experiences. All of our enterprise customers, particularly those in industries like life sciences, have a very high volume of gatherings in nonhotel venues, and will benefit from staying within the Groupize platform to manage all of their venue needs."
What's more, de Gaspe Beaubien added, the deal could expand the Vendry's profile significantly. Groupize technology is available to travel and expense giant Concur's 55,000 customers as an add-on, in the form of Concur Event Management by Groupize. "We're bringing a new audience of qualified corporate buyers to the Vendry ecosystem," she said.