event-planning
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Tagvenue vs HeadBox vs Hire Space Isn’t One Contest
Three venue-booking platforms can look interchangeable until the brief gets real. The smartest choice depends on whether you want to search for yourself, hand the job to an enterprise partner or lean on a human concierge.
Tagvenue
Tagvenue is a free-to-use online marketplace for booking event venues, connecting event planners, companies and private hosts with more than 20,000 verified spaces across the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Ireland. Founded in London in 2015 by Lancaster University friends Maksims Kondratjuks and Artur Stepaniak, it lets people search, compare and enquire about everything from meeting rooms and restaurants to boats, galleries and converted churches - and only charges venues a commission when a booking is confirmed.
HXE (Huixiaoer)
HXE (Huixiaoer) is a Beijing-based MICE technology platform that lets companies search, compare and book hotel conference rooms, meeting venues and event services online. Marketed globally as Eventbest, it aggregates 150,000+ hotels and event venues, has served more than 400,000 corporate clients, and partners with major hotel groups including Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Shangri-La, Wyndham and Langham. HXE turns a traditionally offline, quote-by-phone procurement process - meetings, conferences, incentive trips and group business travel - into a one-stop digital marketplace covering venue data, price comparison, catering, accommodation and logistics.
Marco Experiences
Marco Experiences is a San Francisco startup that turns the miserable job of booking a company offsite into something closer to a search box. Its AI scans 4,000-plus vetted hotels, negotiates group rates 20-40% below retail, and lets teams book rooms, meeting space, and meals with no phone calls, contracts, or service fees. Founded in 2019 by Suman Siva and Nick Freeman, Marco started life as a social-events product, pivoted through virtual experiences during the pandemic, and landed on group travel for distributed teams - now used by 5,000+ teams including Figma, Gusto, Ramp, and Notion.
Partiful
Partiful is a free event-planning platform built for the way people actually invite their friends: a link sent over text, a customizable invite page, and effortless RSVP tracking. Founded in 2019 by Palantir alumni Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao, the New York company turned the unglamorous chore of organizing a birthday or a housewarming into something people genuinely enjoy. It became a Gen Z staple, was named Google Play's Best App of 2024, landed on TIME's 2025 list of the 100 Most Influential Companies, and now reaches users in more than 100 countries.
Jenni Ellis
Jenni Ellis is the Executive Assistant to the CEO at CompScience, a San Francisco insurtech building AI control systems that aim to prevent one million workplace injuries by 2035. The right hand to founder Josh Butler, she runs the day-to-day machinery behind a fast-scaling, Series B startup. Before CompScience she logged operations and office-management time across some of the Bay Area's best-known tech names - Replicate, DoorDash, Instacart, and Dropbox - building a reputation as the steady operator who keeps founders and offices moving. Colleagues describe her as vivacious and enthusiastic, a natural leader who keeps tabs on the day-to-day flow of a business.
Shreya Murthy
Shreya Murthy is the cofounder and CEO of Partiful, the text-first party invitation app that became Gen Z's default way to gather. Launched in 2020 during pandemic lockdowns, the New York company has grown past millions of users, raised a $20M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, won Google's Best App of 2024, and landed Murthy on the 2025 TIME100 Next list. A Princeton politics grad and ex-Palantir operator, she left mission-fatigued tech jobs to build the social layer for offline life, betting that parties are not frivolous but infrastructure for community.
HoneyBook
HoneyBook is an AI-powered business management platform built for independent service professionals - photographers, event planners, consultants, and creative freelancers. Founded in 2013 in San Francisco with roots in Tel Aviv, the platform combines CRM, contracts, invoicing, payments, scheduling, and workflow automation into a single clientflow hub. With $498M in total funding, a $2.4B valuation, $140M ARR, and more than $12 billion in payments processed, HoneyBook has become the dominant platform for the growing independent economy - helping over 100,000 small business owners run client relationships from first inquiry to final payment without switching between a dozen tools.
Vishal Joshi
Vishal Joshi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Joy, a modern wedding and celebration platform that has helped millions of couples plan their weddings with beautifully designed websites, all-in-one registries, and guest management tools. A former Microsoft Azure product manager who spent nearly a decade helping build cloud infrastructure, Joshi left to co-found Joy in 2014 through Y Combinator's S16 cohort. Joy has raised over $44M in funding from investors including General Catalyst, Sierra Ventures, and celebrity angels Joe Montana and Marc Pincus, and has grown to nearly 500 employees.