135,000 US Planners Still Book Corporate Events by Email

01 /The Concept

Nowadays built an AI assistant for planning corporate events – whether across town, across the country, or on another continent.

The platform's database covers more than 400,000 venues across the world. A corporate organizer specifies dates, headcount, and requirements; the AI assistant identifies suitable venues and fires off inquiry emails requesting availability and pricing for the full package – space rental, accommodation, catering, transfers, excursions, and more. Nowadays is also an IATA-certified travel agency, so it can handle flights directly.

The real value isn't in sending the initial emails. The AI follows up automatically – including by phone – when a response never comes or comes back incomplete. It negotiates on price, citing competing venue quotes. The goal is to produce a comprehensive comparison matrix so the organizer can make the best-informed decision possible.

Nowadays charges 15% of the total event budget and only takes on engagements above $20,000. Founded during last year's Y Combinator batch (which provided the initial $500,000), it has since helped companies including Google, Stripe, and Notion plan events with a combined budget of $4 million. The startup has now closed an additional $2 million round.

02 /Why It Matters

At first glance this seems like a narrow, unsexy niche. It isn't.

The global corporate events market was worth $300 billion in 2017 and is projected to reach $1.2 trillion by 2032. If you zoom out to the full US events, exhibitions, and conferences market, you're already looking at 1.8 million events per year with roughly $400 billion in combined budgets.

Corporate events are a subset of that, but the estimate excludes the long tail of internal gatherings – team offsites, board meetings, company all-hands, holiday parties – many of which easily clear the $20,000 threshold Nowadays uses as its floor. The US alone had 135,000 professional event planners in 2022, and a meaningful share of their day-to-day work is exactly what the Nowadays AI now handles.

The space is crowded enough that other startups have already staked out adjacent positions. TeamOut ([related review](/review/zarabatyvat-mozhno-i-malo-tolko-esli-chasto)), with $3.2 million raised, covers events of any size but has a particular focus on small remote-team offsites. Bizly ([related review](/review/nuzhen-uber-dlja-vstrech)), with $25.3 million raised, goes further – adding attendee registration, planning tools, and workflow management on top of venue and travel booking.

The market is also expanding beyond traditional corporate buyers. Online creators and influencers are increasingly hosting live events to deepen community ties with their audiences – a trend that River ([related review](/review/a-kto-skazal-chto-socialnaja-set-mozhet-byt-tolko-v-onlajne)) is building around, with $1.56 million raised in October. River connects influencers with local event organizers around the world.

Generation Z's well-documented desire to socialize offline is a related tailwind. POSH ([related review](/review/pojdjom-potusuemsja)) is riding it with a platform for small local events and a consumer app for discovering what's happening nearby. Its long-term vision: a turnkey event-planning platform covering venue, catering, security, photographers, and everything else – and it's actively recruiting online creators to drive offline meetups for their audiences, putting it in direct competition with River.

03 /Opportunities

The corporate offline events market is large and growing organically. It's also being propelled by a few distinct trends:

- The rise of remote work is pushing distributed team leaders to organize regular in-person gatherings for alignment and team building. - Online creators are moving events offline to strengthen their communities. - Gen Z is actively seeking offline social connection, which should increase the number and frequency of local events.

But planning any event – regardless of size – is a massive hassle consisting of entirely routine steps: send an email, get no reply, call, call again, compare, negotiate, confirm, remind, check again. An AI agent can handle the overwhelming majority of that sequence, making event planning faster, cheaper, and less painful – and enabling cost comparisons across more vendors than any human team could manage.

The opportunity, then, is building AI-native event planning platforms. The AI assistant handling search, negotiation, follow-ups, and reminders is the core differentiator – not just a nice-to-have feature.

These platforms don't all have to be general-purpose. There's room for specialists: small-city local events, influencer community meetups, corporate team building, even weddings and milestone celebrations, which can carry budgets that dwarf many professional corporate gatherings.

It's worth noting how Nowadays came to exist: its founder was organizing a corporate event for her employer when she couldn't get pricing from ice cream truck vendors, then ended up sourcing food manually from local restaurants because there was no simple way to order catering. She ran into the broader reality that the services market – unlike the product market – is still largely undigitized. That won't last. Event-planning platforms are just one front in the larger digitization of professional services. The categories most ripe for the same treatment share a common profile: high transaction value, heavily manual coordination, and a services market that's still largely phone-and-email. Corporate travel, venue-based hospitality, and professional conference production all fit that profile – and none of them have yet produced a platform with the kind of AI-native automation layer that Nowadays is building for events.