Conferize closes USD 1.33 million investment to revitalize physical conferences in the 21st century
SAN FRANCISCO, September 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --
Today Conferize, the online community for conferences and professional events, announces the closing of its seed round.
The Meeting and Events Industry is globally a trillion dollar market and remains an unrivaled backbone in the knowledge economy. Conferize is now helping to revitalize the industry's importance in the digital age with an event-specific online platform for event organizers, speakers, and delegates.
By leveraging unique content, such as video and presentations, along with unique networking opportunities, Conferize is extending the impact of physical events online. Through Conferize, professionals can constantly keep up with latest industry knowledge and thought leaders from events, and get peer powered information about relevant events to attend. This way the organizers form specialized communities to expand their event lifecycle and improve sales targeting.
Martin Ferro-Thomsen, Co-Founder and CEO says, "We've been very fortunate to close this investment round with experienced entrepreneurial investors who believe in our team, the market and our product. We're striving to become the leading platform for professional events worldwide and to serve the best content and networking to online communities. We are now able to execute on this vision on a much larger scale."
Conferize is founded by experienced serial founders, including both a former Co-Founder and the former Director of Business Development of Issuu, the global leader in online publishing. The many similarities between publishing and conferences led the founders to discover the vast untapped potential around conferences, where roughly 90 % of a conference's potential audience is left unserved due to the lack of a centralized online platform for professional events.
While e.g. film, publishing, music and travel are domains that effectively have gone digital as industries, The Meetings and Events industry poses unique challenges. Unlike a song or a video, a conference and its associated content are multimedia-based and time- and-place-specific. Combined with the industry's inherent fragmentation this poses a level of complexity that no company, before Conferize, has been able to capture and present in a scalable and unified way on the web.
The seed round totals USD 1.33 million and is led by a group of angels and an institutional investor and will be invested to further establish Conferize's unique position in the global market.
About Conferize
Conferize has won acclaim at several international events, such as DEMO, Red Herring, Best Event Technology and European Venture Summit. The platform currently hosts over 2.5 million people and 12 million content items from thousands of conferences. Notable customers include Microsoft Sharepoint Connect, Dublin Web Summit, CloudBeat, Internet Week Europe and many more. Conferize is co-founded by Martin Ferro-Thomsen, Martin Moen Wulffeld, Jesper Vestergaard, and Jon Schäffer and has a physical presence in the United States, Europe and Asia. Advisors include Colin Crawford, former CEO of Macworld and EVP at IDG.
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