Posted on June 10, 2026
This article was sourced from this post
Some of the biggest changes happening in event tech right now are a ripple effect of everything that went down in the past year. And if you’ve been in this industry long enough, you already know how it’s felt.
December 2025 was a rough few weeks for a lot of enterprise event managers. Tools they had been working with (some of them for years) were suddenly being sold off or folded into bigger platforms. In the span of a few weeks, Cvent spent roughly $700 million acquiring two platforms, Eventbrite agreed to be taken private for $500 million, and an event tech landscape that was already crowded got reshuffled overnight.
Our CEO, Pedro Góes, said it best when the deals were announced: if the biggest players in the space keep buying everything in sight, there won’t be many independent alternatives left to choose from. Not because those tools failed. Just because they got absorbed.
The question isn’t whether consolidation is good or bad for the industry. The real question is what it means for you — the person who still has a conference to run, a board to report to, and a vendor contract that now has a different company’s name on it.
In this article, we’re breaking down what’s actually happening, why it matters for enterprise event managers specifically, and what you should be asking before you sign or renew anything.
What actually happened in December 2025?
So what exactly happened in December 2025 that had such a ripple effect on the current state of event tech? Well, according to Event Tech Live, Cvent, already one of the most dominant names in enterprise event technology, spent roughly $700 million in a single month. They first acquired Goldcast, a video content platform built for B2B events, for approximately $300 million. Then ON24, a webinar and virtual events platform, for $400 million. Two acquisitions, less than a month apart, and this was on top of several other deals Cvent had already closed earlier that year.
Then, separately, Eventbrite filed with the SEC, confirming it had entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by Bending Spoons, which is an Italian tech holding company, for approximately $500 million in an all-cash deal.
On the surface, these look like three separate business decisions made by three separate companies. But if you take a closer look, a pattern starts to emerge.
Goldcast was building AI-powered content tools for marketers. Eventbrite was running ticketing and registration. By definition, both are event tech. But the market valued them like they were in completely different industries because in a way, they are.
There are two event tech markets now. Which one is your vendor?
None of what happened in December 2025 was random. And Pedro Góes, who has been building in this space for over a decade, saw the pattern clearly when the deals dropped. His read was simple: the market just drew a line — and depending on which side of that line your platform sits on, the next few years look very different for you as a buyer.
On one side, you have what the market is calling a growth asset.
- AI capabilities
- Video content
- Marketing automation
- Pipeline attribution.
Tools that help CMOs prove that events drove revenue. Goldcast lived here and the market valued it at roughly 27 times its annual revenue to prove it.
On the other side, you have what the market is pricing, like:
- Infrastructure.
- Registration.
- Ticketing.
- Onsite operations.
The tools that make the actual event happen, the check-in flow, the badge printing, the mobile app that 3,000 attendees download the morning of your conference. Eventbrite lived here. The market valued it at roughly 1.5 times revenue. Same industry, same label, roughly 20 times less valuable in the eyes of the people writing the checks.
A lot of platforms right now are trying to live on both sides of that line at the same time. They’re pitching you on onsite execution while quietly repositioning themselves as MarTech to attract acquirers or investors. That’s not necessarily dishonest; it’s just business. But it creates a real problem for the person who signed a three-year contract based on one product vision and is now watching the roadmap drift somewhere else entirely.
Think about it this way. If your platform just got acquired for its AI content capabilities, what is the engineering team being measured on for the next four quarters? It is almost certainly not making your badge printing faster or improving the offline sync on your check-in terminals. Those things still work — for now. But they’re not where the investment is going. And over time, “still works” and “actively maintained” start to feel very different when you’re standing on a show floor at 7 am and something breaks.
The two-tier market Pedro identified isn’t just a financial observation. It’s a preview of how event tech vendors are going to behave over the next few years — what they build, what they deprioritize, and ultimately who they’re actually building for. The honest answer is that MarTech is being built for the CMO. Which is fine. But someone still has to build for the event manager. And right now, that list is getting shorter.
The questions every enterprise event manager should be asking right now
If the last two sections made you want to pull up your vendor contract and read the fine print — good. That’s exactly the right instinct. Because the reality is that most event managers don’t find out their platform has changed direction until they’re already mid-renewal, mid-planning cycle, or worse, mid-event.
You don’t need to panic. But you do need to ask better questions — of your current vendor, and of any platform you’re considering signing with. Here are five that matter more right now than they did two years ago.
Question 1
Who owns you — and what do they actually want?
This is the one most people skip because it feels uncomfortable to ask a sales rep directly. Don’t skip it. Is this platform owned by a private equity firm that’s building a portfolio toward a future exit? A strategic acquirer assembling a MarTech stack for CMOs? Or a team that is still independently focused on making events work operationally? The answer tells you a lot about where the product is going — and whether your needs are part of that journey or just along for the ride.
Question 2
What happens to my data if you get acquired?
This one needs to be in your contract, not in a sales conversation. Ask specifically about data portability — can you export everything cleanly if you need to leave? Ask about SLA continuity — does your service level agreement survive a change of ownership, or does it get renegotiated? Ask about data residency — if the acquiring company is headquartered in a different country, does that change where your attendee data lives? These are not hypothetical questions anymore. They are things that are actively happening to event managers right now.
Question 3
Is your core team still intact?
Not the executive team. Not the sales team. The people who actually built the product — the engineers behind the check-in flow, the app, the CRM integrations. Are they still there? This is harder to verify, but it’s worth trying. A platform that has gone through two rounds of post-acquisition layoffs in 18 months is a different product than it was before, even if the interface looks the same. The institutional knowledge that made it work for your specific event type may have already walked out the door.
Question 4
Is your roadmap event-first or marketing-first?
There is nothing wrong with a platform that has decided to go all-in on MarTech. That is a legitimate product direction. But you need to know if that’s what you’re buying. Ask to see a roadmap. Ask what the last three major product releases were. Ask what percentage of engineering resources are going toward onsite execution versus content, analytics, and pipeline attribution. If every answer points toward the CMO and away from the show floor, that is useful information — and you deserve to have it before you sign, not after.
Question 5
What does your compliance picture look like under new ownership?
For enterprise event managers, this one is non-negotiable. SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001 — these certifications are not automatically inherited when a company changes hands. A new parent company means new infrastructure decisions, new data handling policies, and potentially a gap period where the compliance posture you relied on is being re-evaluated. If you’re running events for financial institutions, healthcare companies, or government agencies, you already know that a compliance gap is not an inconvenience — it’s a liability. Get the current certification status in writing, and ask explicitly what the ownership transition means for renewal timelines.
None of these questions is aggressive. They’re just the ones a vendor with nothing to hide should be able to answer without hesitation. If they can’t — that’s your answer.
What stability actually looks like in event tech right now
With all of that said — the acquisitions, the roadmap pivots, the shrinking support teams — it’s worth being clear about something. The goal here isn’t to make you distrust every vendor in the market. Some platforms are genuinely stable, genuinely focused, and genuinely built for the event manager rather than the investor deck. They exist. You just have to know what to look for.
Stability in event tech right now looks like a few specific things. It looks like a founder who is still in the building and still accountable to the product. It looks like a compliance stack that wasn’t assembled to impress a procurement checklist but because the customer base actually requires it. It looks like an AI roadmap that is solving problems on the show floor rather than generating video clips for a LinkedIn content calendar. And it looks like pricing that reflects what an event management platform should cost — not what a private equity firm needs to charge to justify a $4.6 billion take-private.
Independence isn’t a selling point. It’s a structural reality. A founder-led company answers to its customers first. A PE-backed platform answers to its exit timeline first. Those are not the same thing.
We’ll be transparent here: InEvent fits that description, and that’s why we’re mentioning it. Not as a pitch, but as a reference point for what the alternative actually looks like in practice. Pedro Góes, InEvent’s CEO, said it plainly when the December deals were announced: the commitment is to event planners, full stop. That’s not a repositioning. InEvent has held US government Authorization to Operate, used by agencies including NASA, the SEC, and the FDIC, which means the compliance bar isn’t aspirational; it’s already cleared. SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI DSS — these aren’t pending certifications. They’re in place.
The AI roadmap at InEvent is built around execution — facial recognition check-in, real-time attendee data, AI-powered translation across 100+ languages for hybrid events. Not content repurposing.
Not pipeline attribution dashboards. The actual event. And the price point — starting at around $9,990 per year — sits at roughly half of what Cvent charges and well below Bizzabo, without the uncertainty of what a new parent company decides to do with the pricing model next renewal cycle.
Again — the point isn’t “choose InEvent.” The point is that platforms like this exist, and in a market that is consolidating fast, knowing what to look for matters more than it did 18 months ago.
The market is consolidating. Your strategy shouldn’t.
Consolidation is not the enemy. Honestly, some of it will produce genuinely better tools — deeper integrations, more resources behind fewer platforms, cleaner tech stacks for enterprise buyers who have been managing five vendor relationships when two would do. There is a version of this where the industry comes out stronger on the other side.
But that version takes time. And in the meantime, the landscape is changing faster than most procurement cycles are built to handle. The average enterprise event manager is working on a 12 to 24-month planning horizon. The average acquisition integration takes two to three years to fully play out. Those timelines don’t line up. Which means decisions you make today — or renew without thinking about today — could leave you mid-cycle on a platform that has quietly become something different from what you signed up for.
The event managers who are going to be fine through all of this are not the ones who picked the biggest platform or the most recognisable name. They’re the ones who asked the right questions before the ink dried. Who their vendor answers to. Where the product is actually going. Whether the people who know their account are still there.
Whether the compliance certifications they’re relying on will still be valid after the next board decision.
Those questions are not complicated. But they are easy to skip when a sales cycle is moving fast and a conference date is getting closer. Don’t skip them.
If you want to see what an independent, founder-led event platform actually looks like in practice — one that is built around execution rather than exit strategy — we’d love to show you.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is event tech consolidation?
Event tech consolidation is when event technology companies are acquired, merged, or absorbed by larger platforms or private equity firms. What’s happening right now is a significant wave of this — Cvent spent roughly $700 million acquiring Goldcast and ON24 in December 2025 alone, while Eventbrite was taken private by Bending Spoons for $500 million around the same time. The result is a market with fewer independent platforms and more tools bundled under a smaller number of parent companies.
2. How does a platform acquisition affect enterprise event managers?
In the short term, most things look the same. The logo might change, but the login screen doesn’t. The real impact tends to show up over time — in support team changes as post-acquisition layoffs kick in, in product roadmaps that shift to serve the acquirer’s goals rather than yours, and in compliance or pricing changes that follow a change of ownership. For enterprise event managers running high-stakes events with complex compliance requirements, these shifts matter more than they might for smaller buyers.
3. What should I ask an event management vendor before signing a contract?
Five questions matter most right now: who owns the platform and what are their goals, what happens to your data if the company is acquired, whether the core product team is still intact, whether the roadmap is event-first or marketing-first, and what the compliance picture looks like under current — and potentially future — ownership. Any vendor that hesitates on these is telling you something.
4. Is Cvent still independent?
No. Cvent was taken private by Blackstone in a $4.6 billion deal in 2023 and is no longer a publicly traded independent company. Since then, it has made several acquisitions including Goldcast (~$300 million) and ON24 ($400 million) in December 2025, as well as earlier deals in 2024 and 2025. Industry observers believe Cvent is positioning for a future re-IPO at a higher valuation.
5. What are the alternatives to Cvent after the Goldcast and ON24 acquisitions?
There are still independent enterprise event management platforms operating in the market. InEvent is one — founder-led, compliance-certified to government-grade standards (SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI DSS), and priced at roughly half of Cvent’s starting price. Other alternatives worth evaluating include Bizzabo, Stova, and RainFocus, depending on your event type and scale. The key is looking beyond brand recognition and asking specifically about ownership structure, roadmap direction, and compliance status.
6. What happened to Eventbrite after the Bending Spoons acquisition?
Bending Spoons completed the acquisition of Eventbrite in March 2026 for approximately $500 million. Shortly after closing, new leadership announced staff cuts and a shift to a leaner operating model — consistent with Bending Spoons’ established playbook across previous acquisitions including Evernote, Vimeo, and WeTransfer. Eventbrite is now a private company, no longer publicly traded, and organizers on the platform should expect pricing and product changes as the new ownership settles in.
About the Author / Adedoyin
