An estimated $500 billion are spent on events every year, but the industry has been slow to adapt to digitization. This dire need for automation and optimization appears to be coming to an end given the recent announcement from Splash. The company recently announced a $7 million series B round led by Ascent Venture Partners. With this influx of cash, the company is looking to raise the profile of the event marketing space among B2B marketers and continue to build out technology that demonstrates a return on these massive events spends. It appears as though the market is ready for event software to take its place in the marketing stack. As Geoff Oblak, general partner at Ascent Venture Partners, explained: This is something that large companies are beginning to recognize as more than half of companies of the Fortune 500 are Splash clients. The company noted that over 80 percent of their new customers this year are using their enterprise product, a sign that the secret is out: events turn into to sales. Newscred’s VP Marketing Adrienne Wright, put it like this: Splash’s news does not end there: the company made two key hires from two of New York City’s most recognizable startups. David Greenberger, former Foursquare’s head of sales, joins the team as vice president of Sales, and Conrad Rushing, who was a director of engineering at Tumblr, is now Splash’s vice president of Engineering. Attracting a crowd is something Hindman is accustomed to, having previously been employed as the events director at Thrillist. Having worked in the space for some time, Hindman sees nothing but growth for both Splash and the marketers that use their event platform: How the events space hasn’t adopted this kind of technology yet is behind us. But at least Splash is getting the ball rolling.
