In case you missed the announcement last week, we raised $4.7 million in funding to help build the future of event planning in a post-pandemic world.
We have been extremely excited about this step forward and the overwhelming support we have received. So in case you missed the news, here’s what has been happening at Planned.
We’ve had our eyes set on a goal of empowering better event planning since Planned was founded in 2017 by Marc-Antoine Bonin and Emeric Noel. Since then, we’ve worked to create a one-stop-shop platform for our clients with over 10,000+ suppliers across North America.
Not only do we think that our platform has continued to revolutionize the event planning industry, but we think our clients at Google, Michelin, Amazon, Nespresso, BMO, Bumble, MindGeek and L’Oreal would agree.
During the downtime that the pandemic created for the meetings and events industry, we have spent 2020 focusing on building our product with features that are key in planning a successful corporate event and building relationships with suppliers across North America.We’ve managed to establish 600+ qualified partners this year who we are proud to present to our clients.
Although COVID-19 hit the event planning industry hard, we used this time to launch our vendor marketplace in October. This marketplace includes suppliers who have adapted their services to what this year has brought, such as offering virtual and hybrid options.
As for the upcoming features on our platform, our Product Manager, Gabriella says “After many (many) conversations with our clients, we’ve been able to identify several of their pain points in the event planning process. These include having to return to the same suppliers every event due to a lack of a good discovery process, having conversations and documents in several different folders and tools, as well as decentralized and messy tracking of budgets and post-event metrics. As such, we’re building a platform to help tackle four key pieces: supplier discovery, centralization, collaboration, and tracking.”
- Discovery: A complete marketplace for discovering great suppliers in several categories.
- Centralization: Centralizing of conversations, documents, payments, and spend.
- Collaboration: Collaborating with other members on events, and hierarchical permissions (so managers can look at overall team spend).
- Tracking: Ability to track spending, per category/event/city/etc.
This all to say that although COVID-19 hit the event planning industry hard, we have continuously been encouraged by the innovative approaches and resilience of our clients and partners. We’re humbled by their support through this tumultuous year.
We’re ready to take on 2021 and continue to support our clients, partners and the event planning industry as a whole.
If you have any questions or would like to find out more about what the new year will look like for Planned visit our website and request a demo with our team.
