Stop Gambling on Attracting The Right Attendees To Your Events

Can Vendelux’s Precision Attendee Tool Fix the Industry’s Costliest Guess?

For corporate planners, the most expensive gamble isn’t the catering bill or the stage build. It’s the prospect who never shows up—the one high-value attendee who might have turned a six-figure sponsorship into a multimillion-dollar customer. For exhibition operators, the gamble is just as brutal: one wrong audience mix, and a sponsor churns. One bad renewal cycle, and a portfolio begins to wobble.

For decades, both sides played blind. Lists were recycled, brokers peddled stale data, and decisions were made on instinct. The event industry has been flooded with platforms promising “better targeting” or “AI matchmaking,” but most have been little more than lipstick on an Excel sheet. Which raises the question: can anyone actually solve this?

Vendelux, a five-year-old New York startup, is the latest to try.

The company, founded in 2019 by Alex Reynolds and Stefan Deeran, didn’t come out of the agency world or the usual event-tech spin cycle. Both had been inside high-growth companies where events were either rocket fuel or expensive flops. They saw firsthand how a single wrong show could waste months of effort and millions in budget. Their solution was straightforward: if digital marketing could target with precision, events should too.

The first iteration was an event intelligence map, sold to corporates like PayPal, T-Mobile, and UPS. By 2023, with $14 million in Series A funding led by FirstMark Capital and joined by Cervin Ventures and event insiders like Jonathan Weiner of Money20/20 and HLTH, Jay Weintraub of InsureTech Connect and Manifest, and SaaStock’s Alex Theuma, Vendelux had shifted toward being a return-on-investment engine. It integrated with Salesforce and HubSpot, showed which accounts were attending which shows, and helped sales teams book meetings before the first keynote.

Now, in Indianapolis at the SISO Leadership Conference, Vendelux is rolling out its newest play. Officially, the company calls it the Delegate Marketing Platform. Personally, I think that’s too abstract for the US market. What it really functions as—and what planners and operators will understand—is a Precision Attendee Tool. It’s not about jargon; it’s about knowing who should be, or is, in the room, and making decisions with that clarity in hand.

The tool promises to identify missing but high-value attendees, using AI agents trained on sponsor demand, industry signals, and past behavior. The company points to proof points: StableCon, a fintech event, where 23 percent of attendees came via Vendelux; HLTH’s ViVE, where executive-level attendance lifted six percent.

For the corporate planner, the appeal is obvious. Walk into a conference with 20 meetings pre-booked, every one of them tied to your target account list. No more selling sponsorships to finance on faith—you can show exactly who’s going to be there. For the audience-acquisition lead, it’s about survival. If she can fill last year’s gaps with 500 high-intent names, her renewal pipeline stays alive. For the sponsorship strategist, it’s about proof. Exhibitors don’t renew for signage; they renew for buyers. A post-show report confirming those buyers were present is the difference between a shaky renewal and an automatic upsell.

These are the professionals who will be in Indianapolis. Not glossy CEOs, but the operators and guardians who get blamed when things go wrong and quietly celebrated when they go right. They’ve heard plenty of promises before. The question this August is whether Vendelux’s tool can deliver—or whether it’s just another platform destined to fade.

What makes Vendelux different is its model. Organizers get the tool free, provided they participate in the ecosystem. Corporates pay for precision. Sponsors see measurable ROI. It only works if all three cooperate. Competitors are minimal, not because the idea isn’t appealing, but because most who tried before failed to deliver trustworthy data or prove impact. If Vendelux can, it changes the equation.

And if it works, the industry five years from now could look unrecognizable. Picture a convention center in 2030: no one wandering aimlessly, CMOs walking in with fit scores instead of headcounts, sponsors asking not “who showed up?” but “which deals closed?” Hovering invisibly behind it all is the Precision Attendee Tool—what Vendelux may brand as “delegate marketing,” but what really feels like the infrastructure for an industry that can no longer afford to gamble.