EventBoard Raises $13.5 M To Build Up Digital Meeting Room Sign Business

August 17, 2016 by Dave Haynes

I’ve written often about the seemingly pedestrian but dead-perfect application of digital meeting room signs, and how the marketplace seems to be all over the things.

Exhibit A – Sixteen:Nine’s companion site – MeetingRoomSigns.biz – now has more than 40 products listed, which is at least 5X of a year ago. The site generates 1,000s of page views a month.

Exhibit B – Boston’s Robin recently completed a $7 million raise, following on $3 million raised earlier.

Exhibit C – Salt Lake City-based EventBoard just completed a $13.5 million series B investment, bringing them to at least $20 million in investor funds.

The company says it has some 1,800 customers, including Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, GE, Viacom, and National Instruments.

EventBoard’s premise, according to a press release:

The modern workplace looks very different from 30 years ago. There are new workspaces, technologies and management styles that focus on productivity and efficiency. Yet, with over 11 million meetings per day and an estimated $37 billion lost each year to unproductive meetings, meetings remain a constant frustration.

With more than 1,800 customers using its tools and data across industries, a shift is happening across businesses that use EventBoard to focus on optimizing people, places, and technology in the workplace.

The Series B brings the company’s total funding to $20.5 million and will fuel support for the sales and marketing team to drive innovation around improving the office experience with employee-focused apps and deep data driven insights.

The company does all the meat and potato meeting room sign stuff – like indicating if a room is free or booked – but also gets into more sophisticated things:

EventBoard’s unique Insights dashboards show how employees are engaging, who and how many people are attending meetings, for how long, how much time and space is needed, what technology is required, and the impact of “ghost meetings” (meetings that are scheduled, but no one attends and the meeting stays booked).

As companies grow, EventBoard helps them plan future meeting space requirements based on insights delivered through analyzing company meeting behaviors and creating the best possible holistic outcome for collaboration and productivity.

I definitely lump digital meeting room signs into the big bucket of digital signage, visual communications, or whatever you want to call it. There’s a challenge and an opportunity for “traditional” signage CMS companies as firms like EventBoard and Robin grow with investor dollars.

The challenge is that they are focused and delivering the rich analytics and application-specific functions needed in workplaces, whereas meeting room sign functionality is a basic or modestly rich add-on to signage CMS platforms.

The opportunity is that these kinds of focused systems are not really set up or designed to do the larger, broader work of a signage CMS. To me, meeting rooms signs are the gateway drug to get targeted customers into broader, more diverse deployments.

If you want to see who all is doing meeting room signs, try this free directory I’ve had developed and now maintain.