Our Investment in Vendelux, the Operating System for Event Intelligence
Written by FirstMark’s Amish Jani (Founder & Partner) and Will Bitsky (Investor)
Events are almost always the single biggest line item in any B2B marketing budget, yet nearly every aspect of event marketing is opaque.
Ask any B2B CMO how they find and select the events they invest in, how they know who is going to be there, how they coordinate with sales, and what their ROI is. Most often you are led to a manual spreadsheet with incomplete data.
It’s shocking that, in an era of data-driven marketing strategies and tech-enabled CMOs, multi-million dollar budget decisions are still being determined via guesswork.
Introducing Vendelux
Vendelux is the first AI-powered event intelligence platform that enables any enterprise customer to plan, execute, and systematically evaluate their event strategy. Equipped with 65mm+ data points across 160,000+ global events, Vendelux 1) enables customers to better anticipate prospective customer and competitor activity, and 2) gives them the automation and tools to close new accounts. They are rapidly adding customers like T-Mobile, Paypal, MongoDB, Okta, and TD Bank to their platform and we cannot wait to see what comes next.
Events are being recognized as a critical part of B2B go-to-market motions and the number one most effective customer acquisition channel. In most B2B sales processes, authentic human interaction is key. The best outbound SDR email ever written can’t hold a candle to a quality in-person interaction at an event.
Though the pandemic may have brought the event circuit to a temporary halt, it’s become clear that ‘remote’ is not a substitute for ‘IRL.’ In particular, as generative AI drives the marginal cost of online content to zero, and data privacy reforms are implemented, digital channels are increasingly saturated, more expensive, and ultimately, less effective. Live events will not only endure, but grow as a critical marketing channel.
A Critical Gap in the Martech Market
Marketing technology (martech) has certainly had its evolutions. There was the accession of Google and the rise of adtech as a category; bold forays by Salesforce and Oracle; adtech’s eventual fall from grace; the rise of CDPs and marketing automation; and in recent years, constant reinvention driven by AI, then privacy, then AI again.
Today, a proliferation of point solutions has led to a fragmented market, and seemingly, martech is in a time of consolidation, not expansion.
It wasn’t until we met the founders of Vendelux, Alex and Stefan, that we realized a glaring opportunity remains in the market. Despite countless attempts at making data-driven decisions around which events to sponsor or attend, or evaluating event ROI, bringing clarity to event marketing has remained a seemingly unattainable goal.
Alex and Stefan however, approached this challenge from an event intelligence perspective; first ingesting millions of data points, then extracting actionable insights, and then combining those insights with workflow tools to drive action and results. The result of this herculean effort is an incredibly sophisticated event intelligence platform that brings transparency to a field that has been intuitively valuable but opaque since its inception.
As we got to know Vendelux’s existing customers, Fortune 500 companies and high-growth upstarts alike, we realized just about every company we know should be a customer. What’s more, all stakeholders on the platform benefit from the powerful flywheel Vendelux has created: as event owners and attendees engage, the value compounds. And as event organizers become part of the platform offering first-party insights, the flywheel spins again. We at FirstMark are incredibly excited and optimistic about the future of Vendelux, and the impact it will have on businesses around the world.
A Field (Marketing) Day For FirstMark
We are big believers at FirstMark in events. We have a significant in-person events strategy ourselves, running 100+ events each year from large conferences like CloudNY, to monthly meetups through our Data Driven and Guilds communities. We know firsthand how important events are, and how significant the challenges are when it comes to planning, execution, and evaluating success.
For that reason and so many more, we couldn’t be more excited to be leading Vendelux’s Series A. If you are a marketer with an events strategy, and you want to learn more, reach out to the Vendelux team today.
