Groups360, a booking engine for meeting space founded in 2014 by a few former Gaylord Entertainment executives, will receive a $50 million investment from Marriott International, InterContinental Hotels Group, Accor, and Hilton.
The company, originally known as Eventaglobal, took the Groups360 name after acquiring Group0Nomics in 2015. It has raised $5.5 million in two funding rounds since its inception, according to Crunchbase.
The new investment will help the company staff up from its current 30 employees, with a large emphasis on growing its engineering and sales teams.
“They’ll have a significant ownership stake, each of the brands will have representation on our board,” said David Kloeppel, chairman of Groups360. “Obviously there’s significant investment and they have a significant economic interest in the future of the company. They saw the things we’ve been doing to improve the shopping experience for planners and lead generation experience on the supplier side.”
It’s an open secret in the meetings space that various hotel giants have worked together to develop a meetings booking engine that could operate seamlessly for the different companies, but past efforts never coalesced for a variety of reasons.
This investment seems to be a major commitment by the hotel companies to bring this vision to fruition and move away from platforms like Cvent that currently control the digital event space booking market.
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