Event booking spaces are on the rise as people seek more immersive experiences. Venu is building a platform for booking spaces for any event on the go. They bring individuals together to connect, celebrate, and innovate. Whether it’s a wedding, meetup, birthday, or photoshoot, you can book any space for your next event. The company has experienced rapid growth in this domain. We sat down with Founder & CEO Adham El-Khadem to learn more about Venu and its recent expansion in North America.
Describe what you do in 140 characters or less.
We bring people together to meet, create, and celebrate. Whether you’re on the hunt for the perfect birthday space, film set, wedding venue for your big day, or a creative loft for a team offsite, Venu gives you the keys to your cities’ best spaces. Venu makes it easier than ever to find, compare and book unique spaces for any event with a single-click. Save money when booking and make money when hosting events.
What was the inspiration behind Venu?
During my time at Vodafone, I had to go through an entire process of looking up venues, even though it wasn’t my role. From searching, to comparing prices, all the way to deciding what venue would suit them, this cycle costed me a lot of time & money for nothing.
And I bet I wasn’t the only one. I couldn’t help but notice that everyone around me was caught in a continuous cycle of getting engaged, married, having baby showers, celebrating birthdays, and countless other occasions, all sharing one common challenge – finding suitable places to celebrate these significant moments.
Even creatives would struggle to find a space to record, document, or even express their art. Amidst all of this, something sparkled. People from all walks of life look for spaces that meet their needs, yet finding “the one” often becomes a hectic long-lasting journey. Why can’t there be a platform that satisfies these demands?
That’s how Venu was born – the platform that eases booking spaces from the comfort of your home, without the hassle of having to look around with no starting point.
How does Venu help bring people together? What is the traction like?
Venu was born to bring more people together to celebrate, meet, or create. We’re live now in 8 cities, from birthday, engagement, and wedding locations all the way to fitness studios, corporate events, and warehouses. You can even book a place to shoot your film, commercial ad, photo session, or record your next song.
Less than a year ago, Venu was just an idea. Today, we celebrate bringing 400,000+ people together all while empowering 700+ venues to generate 7 digits USD in sales through our platform. We’re growing at 400% QoQ in terms of bookings while covering more than 13 different categories.
At Venu, we have 150,000+ active users that can find, compare and book event spaces with total exclusive discounts worth $1,000,000 when you book through our platform.
What is the most popular place to book on the platform?
Our platform offers different space types. From hotels, to villas, rooftops, boats all the way to renting creative studios. Outdoor venues with waterfront or pyramid views are our top sellers.
We found out that 8 out of 10 qualified customers ready to book are price sensitive. That’s why our users tend to book venues offering discounted rates.
For social events, Royal Club & Dahab Island by the Nile are examples of our top sellers while TheGrEEKCampus is one of our hottest spaces when it comes to hosting your next corporate event. Check out the following:
https://venu.ai/Venu/listing-stay-detail?id=1
https://venu.ai/Venu/listing-stay-detail?id=617
https://venu.ai/Venu/listing-stay-detail?id=340
Congrats on being featured in Egypt’s top local magazines with the recent news. Can you tell us more about this?
A lot of local magazines & newspapers have been approaching us for an interview and/or coverage – We ended up being hosted with Egypt’s top magazines with a total reach of 75.9M (what we called the Mo Salah effect) and this helped us on both professional and personal level. In parallel to local players, we were able to get featured as #23 among the top 500 companies in North America. We’ve also been selected as one of the top 10 startups to pitch for JETRO which is a Japanese government-related investment organization and on a personal level, I was selected to be featured in LAWeekly, a weekly alternative newspaper in Los Angeles as one of “Top 10 Visionary Entrepreneurs” who turned their ideas into successful businesses.
Where do you see your industry in the next five years? What are the opportunities?
Our platform was launched at the perfect time to capitalize on a market opportunity valued at at $1.5T+ with a CAGR of 11.2%. It’s made to connect more than 150 million people that are struggling to find the venue for an event of their liking. That said, we see that any of us would be able to use his mobile phone as an access device to all event spaces that could be rented by the day or the hour.
In the next 5 years, we forecast to have more accessible venues online allowing any of us to make more money by leveraging underutilized spaces that could be rented for any event. Hosts would no longer find themselves overwhelmed by countless requests spread across various platforms, or would even struggle to receive any requests at all as they would rely more on a streamlined system to track, manage and control their venue(s) easily.
Ending the hosts’ hassle of having to organize the bookings manually, preventing the overlap of bookings, loss of data, and more headaches all through an all-in-one venue management solution. With more than 50,000 event planners in the Canadian market only, we believe that event planners will be relying more on a comprehensive system that consolidates all their needs into one convenient place, eliminating the manual hassle and streamlining their workflow.
What’s next with Venu? Are there any exciting developments or features coming up with the platform?
Now armed with a dedicated team, an established platform, a successful secondary product, and an unwavering commitment to growth, we set our sights on the B2B market. In the next milestones, we will be working end-to-end to add more corporate partners-in-success to our list.
To further solidify our position in the market and bring more people together through our platform, Venu will launch into new markets horizontally. We will be live in 15+ other cities and on a mission to bring 1,000,000 people together this year. Venu’s ever-expanding database, coupled with its Artificial Intelligence, will help you book places that are normally above your budget. This is made possible using AI to predict pricing and best days to host your occasion, the whole process takes 1 minute.
In Canada, we are going to launch the first-free commission venue management model to empower hosts to make more money through an automated SaaS. For the first time in the Canadian market, Venu will enable Canadians to book event spaces at no extra fees and with discounted rates.
Where can people learn more about Venu?
With a growing networking effect of 1:500, there are a lot of channels to update you about our company. From our 250+ affiliate partners who have access to thousands of users, to our partnered companies with an access of 50,000 employees all the way to our database of retained customers standing at 400,000+ (nothing travels better than the word of mouth).
We do write blogs to keep every stakeholder in the loop and this could be accessed through: https://venu.ai/Venu/blog
Customers looking for discounts, we’ve got them through our downloadable app which is available on both App & Google store: https://venu.ai/app
In parallel to that, all company updates are being posted on our official website www.venu.ai as well as our Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/letsvenu page. We are also active on Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms.
