The Story of Vendelux: Building the Future of Professional Relationships Through Event Intelligence

The Story of Vendelux: Building the Future of Professional Relationships Through Event Intelligence

February 2020 could have marked the end of Vendelux before it truly began. “We had ten unaffiliated customers… all set to go full time. And then the pandemic hit,” Alex Reynolds shared in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. “That was probably one of the lowest moments in my life.”

But the story of Vendelux begins earlier, during Alex and his co-founder Stefan’s time at Shutterstock, where they built a business unit from zero to $30 million in ARR. The growth largely came from events, but the process was frustratingly hit-or-miss: “When it worked well, it was the best thing that we could do. When it didn’t work well, it was a huge waste of time and money.”

This inconsistency revealed a broader industry problem. Companies were investing heavily in events – “24% to 40% of the B2B marketing budget” – yet lacked proper tools to maximize this investment. Event marketers were spending “30 hours every two weeks… just googling to figure out what events I should be at.”

The Pandemic Pivot

When COVID hit, the events industry faced an existential crisis. While competitors like Hopin soared to multi-billion dollar valuations building virtual event platforms, Vendelux made a contrarian bet. “We were skeptical. We felt like the magic around events is getting people together in person,” Alex explains. “And so we figured it was going to come back.”

It was a lonely position to hold. “Those are some dark days, right? You look at yourself and say, is this really going to come back?” Alex recalls. The team used this period to build their platform on nights and weekends, maintaining their day jobs while waiting for their thesis to play out.

Finding Product-Market Fit

As events returned, Vendelux discovered their true opportunity wasn’t just in event selection, but in transforming how organizations approach in-person relationship building. The problem was more complex than initially apparent: “Sales will go to events on their own, SDRs will go, customer success will go, even like recruiting or legal and finance will go to seminars for learning and development.”

This fragmentation created an opportunity to centralize and optimize all business relationship building that happens through events. Rather than just helping companies choose events, Vendelux could help them maximize the value of every in-person interaction.

The Path to Category Creation

Vendelux is now attempting something more ambitious than building an event tech platform – they’re creating a new category. “In the same way that Gainsight took the account management function and essentially turned that into customer success… we see event marketing needing to go through a very similar transition,” Alex explains.

The vision is to elevate event marketing from a cost center into a strategic function, with event marketers becoming the quarterbacks for all in-person business relationships.

The Future Vision

Looking ahead, Alex sees Vendelux’s mission extending beyond events: “Our vision is to empower humanity to build meaningful professional relationships.” While events are their starting point, they’re expanding across the entire value chain of business relationship building.

“Today, we focus very much on the pre-event, everything with planning, but there’s roughly a 40 month end-to-end journey that our customers are going through,” Alex explains. This journey spans planning, execution, and ROI measurement, which can take “anywhere from six to 18 months per event.”

The ultimate goal is to create a platform that can facilitate meaningful professional relationships across any context, from large trade shows to intimate business meetings. As Alex puts it, “100,000 person event like CES looks somewhat similar to a 10,000 person event… Even a business trip that you are going on, that’s sort of more one-to-one.”

In a world where remote work has made face-to-face interactions more valuable than ever, Vendelux is positioning itself to become the central platform for orchestrating meaningful professional relationships – starting with, but not limited to, events.