Naboo is an AI-powered procurement software for ‘Tail Spend’ management that enables companies to book, manage, and pay for corporate events—such as seminars, team-building activities, and large-scale retreats—while providing centralized control over planning and expenses. Earlier this year, Naboo announced a $70 million Series B funding round led by Lightspeed. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Naboo co-founder and CEO Maxime Eduardo to learn more.
Maxime Eduardo’s Background
How did the idea for the company come together? Eduardo said:
“The idea came from a simple observation: companies were investing heavily in bringing people together, but the process behind it was still far too manual, fragmented, and opaque.”
“In most organizations, a minority of larger events concentrate most of the budget, while dozens of business units make many smaller, ad hoc purchases with a wide variety of suppliers. That creates a long tail of unmanaged spend. In practice, around 78% of requests are below $20,000, yet they account for only a limited share of total event volume. Still, they generate a disproportionate amount of administrative work, fragmented vendor creation, compliance risk, quality inconsistency, and lost procurement productivity.”
“That is where the opportunity became obvious. Meetings and events were being treated as a tactical, decentralized category, when in reality they should be managed as a strategic one. We saw the opportunity to build the connective layer for the entire market — a single environment where companies could source, compare, negotiate, contract, and pay vetted venues and services with greater speed, control, and intelligence.”
“From day one, the ambition behind Naboo was not simply to make event bookings easier, but to create the technology backbone for how companies plan and manage events at scale.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Eduardo reflected:
“Some of my favorite memories are the moments when you suddenly realize the dream has become much bigger than the original idea.”
“Every year, our summer offsite and our Christmas celebration are especially meaningful moments for me. In the early days, those gatherings were small. Today, when we all come together and you see how many people have joined the journey, it is incredibly moving. We are now more than 250 people building Naboo, and there is something powerful about standing in a room and realizing that what started as an intuition has become a collective adventure shared by hundreds of talented people.”
“Other defining memories were the opening of our offices in Montreal and the decision to open one in New York. Those moments carried a special meaning because they marked a shift in our story. We were no longer just building a strong European company; we were beginning to open the doors to the global market. For a founder, those milestones are not only operational — they are symbolic. They tell you that the ambition is no longer theoretical. It is real.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Eduardo explained:
“Naboo has grown into a full technology platform for corporate events, with products designed to support every stage of the process.”
“One of our most important innovations is our AI Planner. It manages close to 90% of the research involved in event bookings, helping companies submit rich, context-driven briefs and instantly receive highly relevant venue and supplier recommendations. It also centralizes quotes and supplier proposals in one place, which dramatically simplifies decision-making. What used to require days of back-and-forth can now happen with far greater speed and precision.”
“We also built Control Tower for large enterprises. It gives procurement and finance teams a single place to centralize event spending, approval workflows, and governance across teams and geographies. It brings real-time visibility into budgets, policy compliance, tax considerations, ESG criteria, and category performance. It also connects into procurement environments through PunchOut integrations, helping automate PR and PO creation and eliminating a significant amount of manual work.”
“Our Event App is designed for execution. It allows organizers to manage the logistics of an event from a single application, whether that means participant communication, schedules, operational coordination, or the on-site experience itself.”
“And then there is our Agency and Studio offering, which brings the power of a top-tier event agency into the Naboo ecosystem. It is designed for large-scale, highly customized events and congresses, where creativity, production excellence, and personalization are essential.”
“What ties all of this together is a simple idea: helping companies move from fragmented execution to one seamless platform, from sourcing to payment to on-site delivery.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector recently? Eduardo acknowledged:
“The main challenge in our sector is fragmentation. Meetings and events sit at the crossroads of hospitality, travel, procurement, logistics, and production, which means there are many stakeholders involved and very few standardized systems between them.”
“That fragmentation creates disproportionate complexity. Even though many requests are relatively small, each event often involves more than two suppliers, which means organizations create a long tail of unnecessary vendor records, approvals, invoices, and payments. This drives avoidable process costs, weakens compliance, reduces cost efficiency, and makes it harder to maintain consistent quality.”
“Building in that kind of environment requires more than just software. It requires trust. It requires operational excellence. And it requires the ability to bridge technology with very real human expectations, especially when companies are organizing high-stakes events.”
“What has helped us is our conviction that the future of this category is neither purely tech nor purely service. It is the combination of both. We use AI and automation to remove friction and accelerate decision-making, but we pair that with a white-glove approach that gives clients the confidence and quality they need. That balance has been essential to our growth.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Eduardo noted:
“Naboo began as a venue-finding solution. At the time, that alone was already solving a painful problem for companies.”
“But as we grew, we realized the real need went much deeper. Clients did not just want help finding venues. They wanted a better way to manage the full complexity of organizing events: sourcing, budgeting, approvals, logistics, communication, execution, reconciliation, and even tax reclaim.”
“That is what led us from venue finding into procurement software, and from procurement software into a comprehensive AI-powered platform. Today, our technology helps companies structure what we internally think of as a Source-to-Reclaim approach: bringing consistency, speed, and visibility to the full lifecycle, from demand to contracting, from purchase orders to invoicing, and from reconciliation to VAT and local tax reclaim.”
“AI is now accelerating this evolution dramatically. Meetings and events still generate a huge amount of unstructured information — PDFs with quotes, menus, visuals, contracts, and terms and conditions. Until recently, that data was difficult to analyze at scale. Now AI can extract, compare, interpret, and activate those insights in seconds. It improves sourcing, supports live negotiation, reviews contracts, helps compare terms, answers bookers’ questions instantly, and gives category managers far more powerful analytics. We believe this will fundamentally change how the category is managed.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Eduardo cited:
“One of the first major milestones was establishing Naboo as a leader in France. That gave us the foundation to expand across Europe, where we progressively built both our client base and our supplier ecosystem.”
“The next chapter has been North America. Opening in Montreal and New York is a major step in our international journey and one that reflects the scale of our ambition.”
“From a product standpoint, the milestones are equally important because they show how the company has evolved with the market. We started with a venue-finding tool, then became a SaaS procurement platform for corporate events, and we are now building a new generation of AI-powered solutions that feel much more in tune with the needs of modern companies. In many ways, the story of Naboo is also the story of a category modernizing in real time.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Eduardo highlighted:
“A strong example is Arkema.”
“We first began working with them in France, helping local teams organize their events more efficiently. Over time, the value of the platform became clear, and the relationship expanded into other European branches. What is meaningful in a case like that is not just the volume of events, but the progression. A client may begin with one geography or one business unit, and then gradually choose to standardize event management more broadly through Naboo.”
“This is where the impact becomes very tangible. When a company centralizes sourcing, approvals, supplier governance, and payment flows through one platform, procurement gains much more visibility and control, while internal requesters gain speed and simplicity. In the organizations that have successfully implemented this model, we have observed hard savings in the range of 5% to 15% and meaningful improvements in reclaiming VAT and local taxes on eligible spend.”
Funding/Revenue
Are you able to discuss funding and/or revenue metrics? Eduardo revealed:
“Yes. In 2025, we raised a $20 million Series A, followed by a $70 million Series B in 2026. Those two rounds were important accelerators for our product development and international expansion.”
“In 2025 alone, Naboo represented more than €120 million in event volume, and the company has been growing by more than 200% year over year. We are now present across 10 countries, supported by 70,000+ partners worldwide. In 2025, our NPS reached 89, in a sector where the average is closer to 40, which is a metric we are particularly proud of because it reflects the quality of the experience we deliver.”
“The broader market opportunity is also very significant. Globally, companies spend around $500 billion every year on seminars, offsites, conferences, and corporate events. It is a massive category, and one that is still in the early stages of digital transformation.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Eduardo affirmed:
“What makes Naboo different is that we believe the future belongs to companies that combine the scale of AI with the reassurance of human expertise.”
“A large part of event planning can now be automated. Our technology can handle close to 90% of the sourcing and research process, which creates enormous gains in speed and efficiency. But events are emotional, visible, and high-stakes. Companies do not just want speed; they want confidence. They want quality. They want someone to care about the details.”
“At the same time, enterprise clients increasingly expect more than a booking tool. They want one environment to source, compare, negotiate, contract, and pay vetted suppliers. They want dynamic competitive sourcing, pre-negotiated rates, automated approvals, compliant invoicing, and real-time analytics. They want governance without adding friction.”
“That is why our model pairs powerful automation with a white-glove service layer. We are not trying to remove the human factor. We are using technology to elevate it. I think that is a very important distinction.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Eduardo emphasized:
“North America is only the beginning of our next phase. We have just started opening that chapter, and naturally, other continents may follow in time.”
“At the same time, our ambition is expanding beyond event software in the traditional sense. We increasingly see Naboo as both an AI company and, eventually, a finance company. There is a major opportunity to simplify how companies approve, budget, reconcile, and pay for events through integrated financial tools and payment solutions.”
“Seamless integration will be a key part of that future. To govern this category properly, you need strong connections with ERP and procure-to-pay systems, travel and expense stacks, duty-of-care tools, and secure identity layers such as SSO. We believe the next generation of meetings and events infrastructure will be deeply connected to the rest of the enterprise software ecosystem.”
“If you take a step back, what we are really building is not just a better way to organize events. We are building the infrastructure that helps companies manage those moments end-to-end, with more intelligence, increased visibility, and less friction.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Eduardo concluded:
“One idea that matters a lot to us is this: the goal is not just to prepare events better, but to make it easier for people to truly live them.”
“The moments that matter inside a company are rarely found in a spreadsheet or an approval workflow. They happen when a team reconnects during an offsite, when a leadership group aligns around a shared vision, when colleagues who usually work remotely finally meet in person, or when a company celebrates a milestone together.”
“These moments carry enormous value, but historically the industry has put too much energy into managing the complexity around them. Our mission is to remove that burden. We want to help companies spend less time organizing the experience and more time actually experiencing it.”
