For years, the default model for virtual events was remarkably simple: put people into a video call, give them a presentation, and hope they network afterward. Adib Shadid thought the model was fundamentally broken.
In 2023, while working in higher education in Toronto, Shadid began hosting virtual career fairs for students and employers. Zoom made it easy to put people in the same digital room, but it could not recreate the experience of actually attending an event. There were no natural conversations, no ability to walk around and discover employers, and little visibility into how attendees were engaging. The problem was particularly important for students who had already lost much of their campus experience during the pandemic.
“I realized that students were graduating with little to no on-campus experience, and it was hurting their job prospects,” Shadid says. “I started hosting virtual career fairs over Zoom to bridge that gap, but there was no real networking, no meaningful conversation, and no way to measure how attendees were actually engaging.”
That frustration became the starting point for Gatherly, a Toronto-based virtual events and community platform that is attempting to make online events behave more like physical ones. Two years after its launch, the company says it has generated nearly $500,000 in revenue from hosting events, while remaining 100% bootstrapped.
From Archaeology to Hospitality
Shadid’s path to building an events technology company was not a conventional one. From the age of 13 through 23, he wanted to become Indiana Jones. He studied archaeology and historiography as an undergraduate, participated in archaeological excavations in Greece and Roman Britain, and wrote a thesis comparing Eastern and Western cultures. His academic work eventually earned him a full scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in Classical Archaeology at New York University.
But while Shadid enjoyed history, another interest was becoming more influential: hospitality. He worked in room service and bartending before moving into management. He later received a scholarship to pursue an MBA in International Hospitality Management at Glion in Switzerland and joined Kempinski Hotels’ corporate team in Geneva as a Service Quality Auditor.
His career eventually took him to Washington, DC, where he joined the opening team for the historic Watergate Hotel following a $100 million renovation. Shadid served as opening manager for the hotel’s rooftop bar, Top of the Gate. During its first summer, the venue generated as much as $35,000 per night and became one of Washington’s most popular destinations, earning coverage in Condé Nast Traveler.
The success attracted the attention of Four Seasons, which recruited Shadid as F&B Manager at its flagship Toronto property. He held the role until the pandemic disrupted the hospitality industry in 2020.
Rethinking Online Events
When COVID-19 disrupted hospitality, Shadid moved into education. From 2020 to 2023, he helped launch and scale a new Faculty of Hospitality and Tourism at Niagara College Toronto’s downtown campus. The experience introduced him to another side of community building and eventually exposed a problem that would become the foundation of Gatherly.
By 2023, hospitality had largely returned to in-person operations. Higher education, however, was still dealing with the consequences of years of remote learning. Students needed opportunities to meet employers, but traditional career fairs were difficult to replicate online.
Shadid initially used Zoom, but the technology solved the basic connectivity problem, not the engagement problem. A career fair is not simply a series of presentations. In a physical environment, students can walk between booths, overhear conversations, approach recruiters, ask questions and make spontaneous connections. Employers can see who is stopping by and have conversations that do not require everyone to be on the same scheduled call. A grid of video windows could not replicate that experience.
That realization led Shadid to build something different.
Building Gatherly
The first version of Gatherly was created specifically to run a virtual career fair for Niagara College students and industry partners. Instead of putting attendees into a static video conference, Gatherly created a virtual environment where participants could move through spaces, visit interactive booths, start spontaneous conversations and network. The initial event validated the concept. A few months later, Gatherly officially launched as a platform offering fully managed virtual career fairs to higher education career centres.
The early customer list grew quickly. Within two months, Gatherly was working with institutions including UCLA, Berkeley, Georgia Tech, the University of South Florida, the University of Toronto, UBC, Wharton and the University of Iowa.
The model also produced an unexpected sales channel. Hiring managers participating in university career fairs were experiencing Gatherly firsthand, and some began asking whether they could use the platform for their own events. That helped push Gatherly beyond higher education and into the enterprise market.
Today, the company counts General Motors, State Farm and DHL among its clients.
Virtual Spaces Instead of Video Calls
The underlying idea behind Gatherly is straightforward: online events should borrow more from physical events. Rather than treating attendees as video feeds, the platform puts them into virtual spaces where they can explore and interact.
For organizers, that creates a different set of possibilities. Companies can create booths, communities and networking environments, while attendees can choose where to spend their time rather than simply following a predetermined presentation schedule. That distinction has become increasingly relevant as organizations have experimented with hybrid work and increasingly distributed communities.
But Shadid’s approach is not rooted primarily in technology. He describes himself as a hospitality and events person first, and that perspective has also shaped Gatherly’s business model.
Initially, Gatherly’s business was primarily based around managing events for clients. The company would take responsibility for the experience and run the event on behalf of an institution or organization.
The approach generated revenue, but it was not infinitely scalable. Shadid eventually saw an opportunity to license Gatherly’s technology directly. Instead of requiring the company to manage every event, organizations could use the platform to host their own communities and events.
The result is a two-part business model. Gatherly continues to host fully managed virtual events for institutional clients, including events that complement larger in-person functions. At the same time, it licenses the platform to organizations that want to operate events themselves.
For a bootstrapped company, that distinction matters. Software licensing can create recurring revenue without requiring the company’s team to be directly involved in every event.
The Gatherly Venture Expo Series
Gatherly has also begun using its own platform as a way to demonstrate what virtual events can look like. Its Quarterly Gatherly Venture Expo Series brings founders, investors, service providers and members of the startup ecosystem into an immersive virtual venue.
Founders building companies and raising capital can showcase their businesses through virtual booths, giving attendees an opportunity to explore companies and start conversations. What began as a marketing initiative has developed into an event series with its own audience and reported business outcomes, including deals and partnerships.
The next Venture Expo is scheduled for September 17. Gatherly’s growing partner ecosystem also includes Boardy AI and SixFigures. Boardy, an AI-powered networking platform, acts as an event concierge for Gatherly’s public events. Attendees can explain why they are attending and who they want to meet, allowing Boardy to help facilitate introductions.
SixFigures works with Gatherly on fundraising programming, giving founders access to a program designed to help them build and execute fundraising campaigns in front of a network of more than 5,500 relevant venture capital investors.
The combination points toward a broader direction for virtual events: not simply recreating physical venues online, but using software and AI to potentially make networking more targeted than it can be in person.
Scaling Up to $500,000 in Revenue
In June 2026, Gatherly marked its second anniversary. According to the company, it had generated nearly $500,000 in revenue from hosting events during those two years.
The company has done so with a team of four, supported by advisors, and without outside capital. That is about to change.
Gatherly remains 100% bootstrapped today, but the company plans to launch a seed fundraising campaign this year. Pismo Ventures has already committed to serving as its lead investor.
The fundraising comes at a point when Gatherly is moving from proving that people will use virtual events to determining how large the software opportunity can become. The company’s evolution mirrors the experience of many technology businesses that emerge from a specific operational problem. What began as a solution to a failed Zoom career fair became a platform serving universities, enterprises, founders and investors.
The broader challenge for Gatherly is one familiar to many event technology companies. Video conferencing has become highly efficient at connecting people, but it is less effective at recreating the social dynamics that make physical events valuable.
Gatherly is betting that the next generation of virtual events will need to do more than transmit video. They will need spaces, discovery, interaction and networking.
For Shadid, the philosophy is rooted in his background in hospitality. Online communities, he argues, are still communities. And virtual events should feel like events, not webinars.
Two years after a failed Zoom career fair sparked the idea, Gatherly is now trying to turn that belief into a scalable events technology company.
