b2b-events
(5)
Informa Built a £4 Billion Business by Owning the Room
The FTSE 100 group does not sell one product. It builds the places - physical, academic and digital - where specialists find one another, learn what changed and decide what to buy next.
Alex Reynolds
He lined up ten customers for February 2020, then the events industry went dark overnight. Alex Reynolds kept building anyway - and turned the messy art of picking conferences into a data problem worth solving.
Step
Step is a new-media and events company that runs one of the largest technology festivals in the Middle East and North Africa. Founded by Ray Dargham in 2011, it stages the annual Step Conference in Dubai and Saudi Arabia, publishes tech newsletters and social platforms like StepFeed, and connects founders, investors and builders. From a first edition of roughly 100 people, it has grown to draw more than 8,000 attendees, with startups featured on its stages collectively raising billions in funding. In 2026 the company extended its model to San Francisco with an AI-focused edition.
Vendelux
Vendelux is a New York-based, AI-native event intelligence platform that turns in-person B2B events into a measurable, pipeline-generating channel. It tracks a proprietary database of 250,000+ conferences and trade shows, matches a company's ideal customers and target accounts against real attendee data, books qualified meetings before the show, and attributes resulting pipeline back to specific events inside Salesforce or HubSpot. Founded in 2021 by Alex Reynolds and Stefan Deeran, Vendelux serves GTM teams at companies like Ramp, Coupa, Contentful and T-Mobile, and has raised roughly $71M across seed, Series A and a 2026 Series B.
Zuddl
Zuddl is a modular event management platform built for B2B event marketers, unifying conferences, field events, and webinars in one system. It handles the full event lifecycle - registration, ticketing, branded virtual stages, on-site check-in, attendee engagement, and post-event content - while pushing engagement data into CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot so teams can prove and improve event ROI. Founded in 2020 and backed by Y Combinator, Alpha Wave Incubation, and Qualcomm Ventures, Zuddl serves brands including Google, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and the United Nations.