
Tagvenue, the London-born venue-hire marketplace founded in March 2015 by Lancaster University friends Artur Stepaniak and Maksim Kondratjuks, grew into a platform spanning six countries, 22,000+ venues and a million monthly visitors — without ever raising a funding round. This is the story of how a business built on commissions, word-of-mouth demand and disciplined hiring reached global scale on its own revenue instead of venture capital.
Maksim Kondratjuks is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Tagvenue, an online marketplace for booking event venues that he started in London in 2015 with Artur Stepaniak. The idea grew out of his own frustration finding conference and wedding spaces while working in equity capital markets at the London Stock Exchange. What began as a UK venue search engine now spans six countries with more than 20,000 verified venues and around 700,000 monthly event organizers.
Artur Stepaniak is the co-founder and CEO of Tagvenue, a London-based online marketplace for booking event venues. He and university friend Maksim Kondratjuks started the company in March 2015 after struggling to find spaces for events, and grew it - largely by word of mouth - into one of the world's leading venue-hire platforms, now covering six countries and used by more than a million event planners each month. Before startups, Stepaniak spent his early career as a derivatives and proprietary trader.