Venture Capital News: Groupize Lands $3.25M Series A2 Funding
2017-10-12
BOSTON, MA, Groupize, the Simple Meetings technology leader, announced today that it has closed an additional $3.25 million in Series A2 funding.
Thayer Ventures led the investment round with participation from existing investors including Golden Seeds and Launchpad Ventures. New investors include Wayfare Ventures, a new hospitality fund, NTX Venture Fund, and the Ace Fund.
The financing builds on an exceptional year for Groupize, which included the launch of its registration product and the integration to Concur's industry-leading travel management platform. Groupize's rapidly growing roster of marquee customers, key partnerships, integrations, and executive appointments are a testament to the current market momentum in the white-hot area of Simple Meetings management. The company's offering is well timed to capitalize on the rapidly increasing demand for solutions that complement the reach of the more complex platforms focused on large meetings.
In a statement, Charles de Gaspe Beaubien, CEO of Groupize says: "The company has executed a successful pivot from being a hospitality solution for hotels to focusing on Simple Meetings for corporations. We found a large market opportunity for our technology and timing is proving that we are quickly becoming a must-have solution for a very large untapped segment of corporate travel - Simple Meetings. Having the support and domain expertise of our industry investment partners helped us define our value proposition and relevance in the industry, that enables us to grow even more rapidly and broadly."
"Thayer Ventures first invested after Groupize won Best Emerging Technology at Phocuswright," explains Jeffery M. Jackson, Managing Director of Thayer Ventures. "We believed the team was on to something with their groups and meetings vision for occasional planners. We see a lot of excitement and disruption in the meetings and events world, even within our own portfolio. Groupize is an innovative and transformational solution, and we are excited to collaborate with and support them as they work to build a great company to lead and transform the $140B Simple Meeting market, which represents 60% to 80% of a corporation's meetings."
Groupize will use the capital to accelerate growth by investing in sales, customer support, and engineering. The raise will leverage the recent momentum and prepare the company for significant growth and continued expansion into the corporate market. Enterprise customers include several Fortune 100 companies, major Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and Corporate Agencies that are strategically focusing on servicing Simple Meetings, a critical area of spend and risk for all Corporations.
"Simple meetings are a sleeping giant," says Kevin Iwamoto of Senior Consultant at GoldSpring Consulting. "So many clients have no idea that the cumulative volume of simple meetings could potentially be even larger than their large meeting tracked volume."
To learn more about Groupize, visit groupize.com.
About Groupize
Groupize offers the leading end-to-end platform for simple corporate meetings. Groupize is revolutionizing meetings technology with innovative, self-service solutions that reduce the complexity of starting, sourcing, managing and measuring simple meetings. Founded in 2011, Groupize is a privately held company and headquartered in Boston, MA. For more information, please call 1.885.GROUPIZE or visit groupize.com.
About Thayer Ventures
Thayer Ventures is an early stage technology venture capital firm specifically focused on the travel industry. Since its founding in 2009, the firm has partnered with entrepreneurs to create, develop and build technology companies that will revolutionize the travel and hospitality industry. Based in San Francisco, Thayer Ventures currently supports some of the world's leading travel technology companies, including Duetto, ADARA, ID90T, TripBam, Liftopia, Traxo, Viridis Learning, Uplift, Reservamos, Social Tables, Sonder Collection and BookingPal and ID90T. Additional information is available on the company's website: www.thayerventures.com.
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