Swoogo Secures $20 Million Series B Growth Investment Led By Bain Capital To Expand Enterprise Event Management Platform Offering
LOS ANGELES, CA, February 7, 2022 / Swoogo, a fast-growing event management software company, today announced a $20 million growth investment led by Bain Capital. The new funding will accelerate Swoogo’s rapid expansion into a full-scale enterprise platform for event management, as well as solidify its competitive offering in the hybrid and virtual event space.
“We are excited to partner with Swoogo at a critical juncture in the company’s evolution and the event management software market more broadly,” said David Healey, a Vice President at Bain Capital. “We believe Swoogo’s differentiated SaaS capabilities, industry pedigree, and driven team position the company well for accelerated growth.” As part of the investment, David Healey will be joining Swoogo’s board.
Founded in 2015 by event technology veterans Leonora Valvo, Tim Cummins, and Neil Keefe, Swoogo’s platform simplifies the overwhelming complexity of corporate event management at scale. Now under the leadership of CEO Christopher Sykes, who acquired a majority ownership stake in March 2020 backed by Eagle Rock Capital, Swoogo has nearly tripled its recurring revenues in the past two years. With expanded offerings that continue to embrace the ethos of ease-of-use, Swoogo’s enterprise client portfolio has also grown rapidly, with businesses including Atlassian, Box, and DocuSign using Swoogo to manage their events.
“Swoogo has been a true partner to us as we’ve scaled our event portfolio and hosted industry-leading digital events, and as we plan for our upcoming flagship event, Team ’22— to be held as a hybrid event in Las Vegas,” said Blane Barker, Senior Team Lead for Event Marketing & Technology at Atlassian. “We appreciate Swoogo’s flexibility, customization, ease of use, and the support we receive from the Swoogo team.”
With the current product earning reviews like “the best business decision you can make as an event prof [G2],” the Swoogo team is looking forward to enabling event marketers to further simplify their workflows through significant feature expansion over the next 18-months.
“It’s a new era for events,” said Sykes. “As a result of COVID and the industry’s rapid pivot to virtual events, we’ve seen decades of development compressed into months. Event marketers have come to expect more from their event technology and event output: more data, more insights, more customization, and more seamless integrations with their martech stack. With Bain Capital’s support, we look forward to bringing the same rich insights we’ve unlocked for virtual events to in-person and hybrid events. Most importantly, we remain committed to our mission of empowering anyone to bring people together, while delivering best-in-class service that puts event organizers first.”
About Swoogo
Brought to market in 2015 by event tech veterans Leonora Valvo, Tim Cummins, and Neil Keefe, Swoogo’s second-generation event management platform upended a dated industry with it’s easy-to-use functionality and world-class support that puts event organizers first. With firsthand experience in the complexity of legacy products in the space, the Swoogo platform is designed to make event management workflows simple and intuitive for teams of one to one thousand.
With Swoogo’s best-in-class registration product, marketers are enabled to easily collect clean, robust, segmented audience information with unlimited attendee types and conditional logic. Combined with in-platform event and attendee analytics, Swoogo’s Attendee Intelligence platform reinforces the value of events for personalized marketing and demand generation. At a Swoogo event, attendees enjoy personalized agendas and Event Hub pages, 1:1 networking, online expo areas, and embedded content together within-person event features like hotel management and event and session check-in with Swoogo Live.
About Bain Capital
Bain Capital, LP is one of the world’s leading private multi-asset alternative investment firms that creates lasting impact for our investors, teams, businesses, and the communities in which we live. Bain Capital’s dedicated Private Credit Group focuses on direct lending opportunities across the capital structure to companies globally with EBITDA ranging from $10 million to $150 million. Our dedicated global team affords us the ability to diligence the most complex situations and provide private capital to those companies. Since our founding in 1984, we’ve applied our insight and experience to organically expand into numerous asset classes including private equity, credit, public equity, venture capital, real estate and other strategic areas of focus. The firm has offices on four continents, more than 1,200 employees and approximately $150 billion in assets under management. To learn more, visit www.baincapital.com.