CHICAGO — The Events Venture Group (EVG) continues its momentum in 2026 with an investment in Nexus Labs, which produces the virtual conference series NexusCast and an annual NexusCon flagship event, and provides a subscription intelligence product, Nexus Pro, for the Connected Buildings industry.
Nexus Labs was founded by James Dice and Rosy Khalife, and the platform has grown to acquire more than 10,000 subscribers, with 170-plus enterprise building owner organizations and more than 60 technology sponsors.
Solving for Fragmentation
The founders behind Nexus Labs identified high fragmentation in the Connected Buildings industry, where owners of commercial buildings were challenged with exploring hundreds of vendors and vendors weren’t able to reach owners looking to modernize all in one place.
“Owners need education to make good calls, practitioners need training to execute and vendors need a credible way to reach both,” said Dice and Khalife. “Those are the three things we monetize: vendor marketing through sponsorships, practitioner training through tickets and memberships, and owner education across all of it.
“The existing CRE technology platforms grew straight out of that fragmentation. You get a siloed conference for every department and every vertical, which forces a sponsor who wants to reach the whole market to spread thin across a dozen events. They also grew out of the hype: In a confusing market, marketers compete by making the biggest claims with the hottest buzzwords, so the content drifts toward whoever’s selling hardest instead of what actually works in a building. That’s where our focus on practicality and outcomes comes in. We organize around the owner’s jobs and what actually gets results, which is the thing none of the siloed, hype-driven events were built to do.”
The platform the team built has delivered. NexusCon claims the title of the “#1 Connected Buildings Event in America,” and is gearing up for its 2026 edition, which is set to take place in Detroit Oct. 6-8.
According to the founders, the investment from EVG will help the existing engine scale and move faster, and provides Nexus Labs with pattern recognition it can’t get from anywhere else.
“Their members have built the defining events in one industry after another, and joining forces with them puts 19 experts on our side who’ve watched these patterns play out before, in health, cannabis, payments and beyond,” Dice and Khalife said. “None of those maps one-to-one onto smart buildings. Our job is to take what they’ve learned building those businesses and apply it to our industry, to make something that fits connected buildings and didn’t exist before. That’s the partnership: their hard-won experience, our domain and community, pointed at a category we intend to win.”
EVG’s Largest Syndication So Far
The investment represents the third by EVG so far in 2026 and seventh overall since launching in 2024, and reflects the group’s dedication to providing event entrepreneurs with financial support and expert guidance as founder-led platform businesses scale.
“We don’t invest because an event had a good year — we invest when we see the ingredients of a durable platform,” said Marilú Páez, Co-Founder and Managing Director of EVG. “In Nexus Labs, we saw founders who have consistently built trust within a highly engaged vertical, expanded beyond a single annual event and demonstrated that they’re becoming the year-round home for the connected buildings ecosystem. Their growth has been disciplined, community-led and capital efficient, which is exactly the type of business EVG looks to support.”
Nineteen EVG members participated in this investment, marking the largest syndication in the organization’s history by investor participation.
“With every syndication we’ve done, we’ve seen more members choosing to invest alongside one another,” said Páez. “That tells me what I experience every day with our membership: We’ve built a group that genuinely believes in our mission and is willing to put capital behind the future of live experiences.
“To date, more than 70% of EVG members have invested in at least one of the seven event businesses we’ve syndicated. For an early-stage community, that’s remarkable. It reflects the trust we’ve built, the discipline of our investment process and the conviction our members have in the founders we bring forward.”
If someone is interested in becoming an EVG Member, the organization welcomes them to reach out at info@eventsventuregroup.com.
