Cvent, a major event management software company, last raised funding around the time the previous century ended.
Today, the company announced that it has raised funding for the second time in its – most fascinating – history, and it’s a whopper:
Cvent has secured $136 million in venture capital financing from New Enterprise Associates and Insight Venture Partners, with Greenspring Associates also participating.
According to data from Dow Jones VentureSource, this marks one of the largest investments in a private software company this year.
It’s pretty amazing that we have seemingly never written about Cvent before. Happy to make an exception this time around. 
In all seriousness, Cvent’s journey as a company is a very interesting one (more on that in a guest post by Cvent founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal). Originally founded back in 1999, and backed by $17 million in capital that was burned almost as quickly as it was raised, Cvent turned around and today bills itself as the world’s largest meetings management technology company.
To give you an idea: the company currently has over 800 employees worldwide.
The company offers cloud-based software services for meeting site selection, online event registration and management, e-mail marketing, and web surveys, currently helping more than 90,000 users in 40 countries manage hundreds of thousands of events, surveys and e-mail campaigns.
The most impressive service offered by Cvent, imho, is its Supplier Network, a free online marketplace that connects event planners with some 150,000 hotels, restaurants and other types venues worldwide. It is most easily described as the “Expedia for meeting and event planning”.
To illustrate its sheer scale: Cvent says its Supplier Network is poised to generate $4 billion in business for hotels alone in 2011 (up from $60 million three years ago).
No wonder Cvent has strong relationships with most of the leading hotel chains from across the globe, including Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Starwood, Intercontinental Hotels Group and Accor.
Companies like Wells Fargo, The Coca-Cola Company, MetLife, Deere & Company and Procter & Gamble use Cvent’s solution for event organization and management.
Aggarwal tells me the investment will enable Cvent to grow its headcount to 1,000 employees – mostly engineers – over the next 12 months, and to solidify its position for its next decade in business. The company will also invest in the development of its social media and mobile products.
Not that they really needed the money; Cvent has apparently been running at a profit for the past 32 straight quarters. It hasn’t always been that way, though, and we’ll soon publish Aggarwal’s riveting account of the past 12 years, and how he got to this point (update: here you go).
Founded in 1999, Cvent is the world’s largest meetings and event management technology company and has more than 1,100 employees worldwide. Cvent offers web-based software for online event registration, meeting site selection, event management, mobile apps for events, e-mail marketing, and web surveys. Cvent helps over 150,000 users in 90 countries manage hundreds of thousands of events, surveys and e-mail campaigns. Cvent has processed over $2.5 billion in online payments and has managed over 30 million event registrations and...
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is a leading venture capital firm, consistently ranking among the top firms in portfolio IPOs each year, with more liquidity events than any other venture capital firm. Since its founding, the firm has backed more than 170 companies that have gone public and invested in more than 290 companies that have been successfully merged or acquired. For more than 30 years, NEA has been helping to build great companies. Our committed capital has grown to...
Founded in 1995, Insight Venture Partners is the fastest-growing venture capital firm specializing in growth-stage Software and Internet investing globally. Insight’s team of growth experts is composed of both technology investors and operating executives with significant experience scaling technology companies. Since inception, Insight has raised more than $5 billion to invest in market leading companies through both minority and majority deals. Insight’s investing flexibility enables companies and entrepreneurs to obtain the deal that makes sense for them, in addition...
Reggie Aggarwal is a noted leader in Washington’s high-tech and association communities. He is the CEO and Founder of Cvent, a profitable venture-backed CRM software company with 800+ employees. Cvent has quickly grown to be the largest event management software company in the country, organizing over 275,000 events for over 7,500+ customers in 40 countries such as KPMG, Hilton and Siemens. Reggie was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year® 2009 in the Greater Washington area. Washingtonian Magazine named...
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