Although not on the scale of Take Eat Easy, perhaps we should chalk this up as another Belgium startup showing early momentum. Book2Meet, the meeting room booking platform, has raised a €2 million funding round from seed and early-stage investor WorldStone Ventures, money it plans to use to boost its presence across Europe, and for further product development.
Launched last October, Book2Meet already has 32,000 meeting rooms available to book through its site, although the startup isn’t disclosing further metrics, such as number of bookings taken. It also claims to be the only pan-European, multi-lingual meeting room marketplace offering transparency in terms of types of rooms available and pricing.
There are of course a plethora of local competitors, such as Sharedesk. Furthermore, a large inventory doesn’t necessarily translate into a large business. That said, investors seem to like what they’ve seen so far.
“The concept of Book2Meet was born out of the fact that on the venue side, the meeting room market was very complex and absolutely not transparent. Lots of hotels were complaining about the difficulty of renting their meeting spaces because no dedicated online platform to promote and sell their inventory existed yet,” Book2meet founder Thierry Vermeiren tells TechCrunch.
“This complexity had, of course, consequences on the customers and the way they were booking meeting rooms at that time. We knew that this traditional procedure was tedious and slow because of the many phone calls, follow ups and incomprehensible contracts. At this point, it seemed obvious to us that this way of working was completely outdated and absolutely not adapted to the digital world,” he adds.
Typical customers using Book2Meet to book meeting rooms include coaches looking for workshop spaces or mid-sized training rooms, entrepreneurs who need a place to meet clients, Personal Assistants, and travel managers and corporate buyers. The kinds of meeting rooms and spaces on offer span “small meeting rooms for HR interviews to major event spaces that can host thousands of guests”.
Meanwhile, Book2Meet generates revenue by charging ten percent of each booking taken. “Ultimately, our users are able to book the most suited room directly online and get immediate confirmation from the venue of their choice. This is all made possible thanks to extensive integrations directly within the inventories of our partners and a performant individual back-end environment to secure correctness of their data,” says Vermeiren.