The all-in-one engagement platform betting that associations and chambers of commerce are done stitching together a dozen disconnected tools.
Ask anyone who has ever run a professional association and they will tell you the same story. The membership list lives in one spreadsheet. The event registrations live in a different tool. The newsletters go out from a third. The invoices from a fourth. And every time someone asks a simple question - how many members came to last year's gala, and did they renew? - the answer requires an afternoon of exporting, matching, and quietly praying nothing got lost. Glue Up was built to end that afternoon.
The company is a business-to-business software maker with an unfashionable but sturdy premise: the organizations that run on membership - trade associations, chambers of commerce, professional societies, nonprofits - deserve one system instead of six. Its platform folds a customer relationship database, event management, membership management, email marketing, an online community, mobile apps, and payments into a single cloud product where the data actually talks to itself.
Glue Up did not begin under that name. In 2013, co-founders Eric L. Schmidt and Olivia Jingshu Ji launched EventBank, a tool aimed squarely at the mess of running events - the ticketing, the check-ins, the sponsor logistics, the data that scattered the moment the doors closed. The frustration was specific and lived-in: event and campaign data was too often siloed, corrupted, lost, or simply confusing.
Events, though, turned out to be a wedge rather than a business. The same organizations that needed help with events also needed help keeping members, sending campaigns, collecting dues, and understanding who was actually engaged. So EventBank kept adding rooms to the house - membership, CRM, email, community - until the original name no longer fit what the product did. In November 2020 the company rebranded to Glue Up, positioning itself as an all-in-one engagement platform. The name is a small joke with a serious point: it wants to be the glue between an organization and its data.
The timing of that rebrand is the part worth pausing on. Glue Up renamed itself and leaned into a broader story in the same year a pandemic effectively switched off the live-events industry it was born in. Rather than retreat to its origins, it widened - virtual and hybrid events, deeper membership tooling, community features to keep people connected when they could not gather. It also closed a Series B round that year, led by GSR Ventures, to fund expansion.
The pitch is easiest to understand as a stack of things an organization would otherwise buy separately. Here is roughly what lives inside the platform, and how central each module is to the everyday work of a membership team.
Because it all sits on one contact database, the ordinary questions get easy answers. Who attended, then joined, then lapsed. Which campaigns drove renewals. Which members haven't shown up in a year. More recently the company has layered in AI features powered by NVIDIA enterprise AI, aimed at content, insights, and automation across those modules - a brain bolted onto the back office.
Glue Up's sweet spot is a specific, and specifically underserved, kind of organization: the association or chamber with somewhere between 50 and 5,000 members. That group has outgrown a shared spreadsheet and a free mailing tool, but it does not have the budget or the appetite for a heavyweight enterprise system that takes a consultant six months to configure.
Its customers are chambers of commerce, trade and professional associations, event organizers, agencies, marketers, and NGOs - the connective tissue of a lot of civic and commercial life. They are the kind of institutions that everyone benefits from and almost no one builds software for.
The competition splits along familiar lines. At the enterprise end sit event and association giants like Cvent and legacy systems such as iMIS and Personify - powerful, expensive, and heavy. At the light end sit tools like Wild Apricot, built for small clubs. Plenty of organizations also try to bolt engagement onto a general-purpose CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot, then spend years wiring it together.
Glue Up's argument is that the wiring is the problem. When the CRM, the event tool, and the email tool come from three vendors, the seams leak - data falls between them, and staff spend their days reconciling instead of engaging. One integrated platform, the company argues, is worth more than the sum of best-of-breed parts that don't speak the same language.
The model is straightforward software-as-a-service. Organizations pay an annual subscription, tiered by the modules they use and their size - roughly a few thousand dollars a year for smaller groups, custom quotes for larger ones - with payment processing layered on top of transactions run through the platform. Public estimates put revenue in the neighborhood of $7.8 million around 2020.
What stands out is the restraint on the funding side. Glue Up built a presence in more than 70 countries, with offices spread across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia Pacific, on roughly $10 million in total capital across a handful of rounds. In an era of nine-figure raises, doing that much with that little is its own kind of statement.
The company's geography is part of its character. It grew up serving chambers of commerce and associations internationally before basing its headquarters in the Washington, D.C. area - McLean, Virginia - and building out a distributed team on five continents. That global footprint is not decoration; membership organizations exist everywhere, and Glue Up sells into markets that most American SaaS companies never bother to localize for.
One small footnote for the search engines: the co-founder and chief executive is named Eric L. Schmidt, which sends a certain type of reader looking for a Google connection. There isn't one. This Eric Schmidt has spent a decade building unglamorous software for the organizations that hold professional life together - a different, quieter project.
Where does Glue Up fit in the larger market? In the growing, under-covered category sometimes called the engagement economy - the software that keeps communities, members, and professional networks alive between the moments they actually meet. It is not the loudest corner of tech. But for the association executive who just wants one answer to one question without opening six tabs, that is precisely the point.