BoomPopAI-powered event planning platform has raised $25 million in equity capital, the company reports exclusively to Crunchbase News.
The startup also secured $16 million in debt and credit through Silicon Valley Bank. The capital a part of the increase was carried out by Viet Cong Wing. Other participants are included in the price Atomic, Acme Capital, Four Rivers Group, Thayer Investment Partners (which counts large hotels as LPs), the Operators Guild Fund and Gaingels. Several individual investors also wrote checks for this round, including MLB All-Star Alex Rodriguezex DoorDash President Christopher Payneand other Silicon Valley founders.
With the latest funding, San Francisco-based BoomPop has raised a total of nearly $56 million since its founding in 2020. The company didn’t want to disclose the valuation, stating only that it was a “good round of growth.”
BoomPop began as a research entity called BoomBox during the COVID pandemic, planning virtual events, before migrating to its current iteration in 2023. It was born from the Atomic Venture studio.
The startup’s primary goal is to act as a “trusted event organizer”, making it easier for companies to plan business trips and events for employees.
“Most people don’t realize that when it comes to business travel, almost 60% of it is done in groups,” said the CEO and co-founder Healey Cypher in an interview. “And most people don’t know that if you want to book more than 10 hotel rooms, you can’t do it online.”
The demand is clearly there. BoomPop said it has greater than 450 customers, including Netflix, Google, Dropbox, Him and her AND Anacondaand is experiencing impressive growth. He took a hundred and fifteenth place in the latest rating Inc. 5000 listrecording a three-year increase of three,073%. Its current revenues exceed $75 million. Cypher expects the company’s total gross revenue to be just over $100 million this quarter. (The company generates 12% to 14% of gross revenue, he said.)
BoomPop’s raise is one of the largest this yr for event-related startups, They show Crunchbase data. All told, startups in this category have raised nearly $252 million globally to date, including the BoomPop funding deal, marking a weak yr for the industry. For comparison, in the whole of 2024, over USD 361 million, in 2023 – USD 435.6 million, and in the peak yr of 2021 – USD 2.1 billion.
How it really works
BoomPop uses artificial intelligence, but operates on the premise that “nothing replaces authentic human connection,” Cypher told Crunchbase News.
It acts as a companion for employees working on planning off-site locations or events for the company, offering each self-service and full-service options. For those that want more support, BoomPop employs a 35-person skilled planning team that handles on-site planning and support “for more complex, higher-end events,” according to Cypher. Currently, BoomPop employs roughly 110 employees.
An worker might tell BoomPop that his company wants to schedule a 100-person founders’ summit with loads of activities inside a three-hour drive from San Francisco. The system would then analyze “millions” of information points in real time, equivalent to weather, hotel and property prices, flights, city-wide events that can also be going down, and past travel plans. It would then offer event options with multiple variations.
Based on the preferences, the AI then takes over success, booking “vetted” vendors, reviewing contracts, creating event web sites, managing invitation responses, and coordinating directly with hotels “to ensure guests’ preferences – such as dietary restrictions – are met.” The company says its AI can complete tasks in minutes that “once took a team of weeks to complete.”
BoomPop’s AI is trained on a proprietary database of chosen, vetted vendors, including hotels, spaces, restaurants, activity planners, caterers and photographers.
For example, it could actually send messages to employees if there is a last-minute change in where to eat dinner. It also can get sizes for any gadget and tabulate any dietary restrictions, in addition to plan minute-by-minute routes, among other things.
To date, BoomPop has helped its customers book over 60,000 hotel nights. Its fastest growing segment are corporate trips and retreats.
Interestingly, the startup not only helps plan events for employees. It also helps them plan events for clients.
“I did extensive research and found that the most important marketing channel for scaled AI companies is customer events,” Cypher said.
Ensuring the scalability of group events
Gaurav Gargfounding partner of Wing Venture Capital, notes that in a post-pandemic world with a more distant and hybrid work model, companies are investing more resources to connect their employees. However, he says the technique of planning and conducting these meetings “is still painfully manual.” “BoomPop combines what was once a collection of tools into one smart product,” he told Crunchbase News by email.
“At Wing, we believe that the next generation of enterprise software will be AI-powered: deeply intelligent, vertically focused, and obsessed with user experience. BoomPop perfectly embodies this thesis. It transforms a legacy, service-intensive industry into a digital, automated ecosystem built for the way today’s teams actually work and travel.”
BoomPop makes money in several ways. First, it charges what Cypher calls a “relatively low” SaaS fee for its offering, which allows internal employees to schedule events. It also offers an optional premium product that acts as a boutique agency to help plan events or off-site events, billed per attendee and per event. BoomPop mainly makes money from sellers who pay it a finder’s fee.
At the end of September Brex Also announced a partnership with BoomPop, which allows companies to book private restaurants and sports suites using Brex points.