UPDATED 09:00 EDT / SEPTEMBER 23 2021

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Online event marketplace startup The Vendry raises $6.5M to scale up its products

Online event marketplace startup The Vendry LLC  today announced that it has raised $6.5 million in new funding to scale up its products and expand into new markets.

Peter Boyce, the founder of Stellation Capital, led the seed round. Also participating in the round were Founder Collective, Primary Ventures, WGI Group, Leadout Capital, Operator Partners, Brilliant Friends and several individual investors.

Founded in 2018, The Vendry offers a marketplace and professional community for corporate event planners. The service offers professionals free access to request for proposal tools that help them source venues and vendors for their events. Other services include an exclusive jobs board, discussion forums, networking opportunities and other resources to keep up with industry news.

The Vendry’s online marketplace connects event planning professionals with the venues and vendors they need to produce successful events. The platform digitizes traditionally manual processes of requesting, collecting and comparing proposals from venues and vendors.

Event planning in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic is not an easy task. With many events switching to online-only in the last 18 months, the industry has seen a massive shakeup. Even now, only some events are returning to in-person, and only then with COVID compliance plans and restrictions such as the need for attendees to be vaccinated.

Despite the unprecedented change, The Vendry said, it has thrived over the pandemic and the shift to online events. The company’s community of users has tripled since March 2020, the month that the U.S. discovered COVID-19, to more than 18,000 event professionals. As event industry professionals shifted to virtual experiences to try to keep engaging with their audiences, The Vendry said, it became a crucial source of shared knowledge, ideas and resources to make the transition as seamless as possible.

“The pandemic has only reinforced the fact that the live events market is ripe for, and in need of, innovation,” Daphne Hoppenot, founder and chief executive of The Vendry, said in a statement. “At the onset, our team was blown away by how event pros in our community came together to collaborate on how they were shifting their events process, whether to virtual or to take place on a smaller scale in-person.”

The Vendry launched a suite of marketplace tools in January 2021 and since then has seen over $10 million worth of requests for proposals published by planners in the community. The company also recently launched Circles, curated networking groups for the top event professionals across the industry.

Image: The Vendry

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