A year ago, a project manager at Mozilla noticed that a conference room on the seventh floor of the software firm's San Francisco headquarters was overrun, while the other three were often empty. The knowledge came by way of EventBoard, a meeting room management app that Mozilla had recently adopted. When he looked into it, the manager realized that the popular room had an Apple TV that staff liked using for demos. He bought a few more TVs, and the traffic jam disappeared.
EventBoard, a meeting room management platform, has come up with a high-tech answer to the perennial problem of divvying up conference room space. Its cloud-based room scheduling software allows people to book rooms through their desktops or mobile devices, display bookings on a wall-mounted iPad, and access real-time analytics on how office space is used.
A product of Salt Lake City, Utah-based Ender Labs, the service announced Tuesday that it had raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Zetta Venture Partners, Marc Benioff, and others. The investment valued the company at an estimated $6.8 million, according to Justin Byers, director of business intelligence at VC Experts, a private investment analytics firm.
One of EventBoard’s earliest adopters was Airbnb, which began using it over a year ago. Now it has 550 customers, including Pinterest,
“It’s been so fascinating that there’s a little Salt Lake City-based startup that’s completely taken over the conference rooms of Silicon Valley,” said Shaun Ritchie, the 37-year-old cofounder and CEO at Ender Labs.
The product, which costs $120 annually per room, ties into Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendars. EventBoard creates a customized theme for clients and lets administrators decide whether to allow overbooking or set time limits. Soon, it will let users to check into gatherings, give feedback on meetings and get directions to conference rooms.
Since the service launched a year and a half ago, many early customers have been tech companies. But Ritchie says the firm is aiming at a market of up to $2 billion that includes not only small and medium-sized companies, but also large companies that lack the technical know-how to build such tools internally.
As open office environments and telecommuting are growing in popularity, meeting rooms are becoming more important than ever, Ritchie says.
“We’re trying to not only provide an interface to solve conflict between people in this space physically, but we can also take that back to the business and say, 'This is how you can start optimizing your facilities,'” he says.
Ritchie says EventBoard’s customizable software and reliance on user-friendly iPads sets it above hardware-focused competitors like Crestron and Steelcase. They’re competing for 7 to 12 million conference rooms across the U.S.
Ender Labs developed the tool to solve an internal problem. There was only one conference room at Neutron Interactive, an internet marketing company that Ritchie founded in Salt Lake City with a partner 12 years ago. After Ender Labs broke off from the company to do iOS development two years ago, it built an app to address the confusion and conflict the room inspired. Ender Labs originally put it out as a free app, but soon realized that it wasn’t scalable or enterprise-grade. So they built out the tool's features and back-end reporting tools and offered it as business software. As interest poured in, Ritchie quit a year ago to become Ender Labs’ CEO full-time.
Although Ender Labs is an early-stage startup (it doesn’t disclose revenues), Ritchie predicts dramatic growth for EventBoard.
“There’s a huge opportunity for this because we had the problem and everyone else has that problem too, it turns out. I mean literally — everyone.”
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