CHICAGO — Grip, an AI-powered event platform, acquired Connectiv Holdings’ event management system (EMS), which powers Connectiv shows including Manifest, Medicarians and Blueprint.
The acquired products now make up Grip’s new Manage product suite, which aims to provide a complete end-to-end platform for users alongside its existing Engage suite of products. With the acquisition of Connectiv’s EMS, Grip now offers event registration, sponsor and exhibitor management, side event management and smart badges to customers.
“The products we’ve launched as part of the Manage product suite have been selected due to customer demand,” said Tim Groot, Founder and CEO of Grip. “We reviewed our sales calls, spoke to existing customers and polled our advisory board to see which products were most in demand. That led us to launching these products first. However, the products we’ve launched today as part of the acquisition are just the start. There will be more products launched in the near future.”
Grip has been integrated with Connectiv Holdings’ EMS since 2018, and from its data it reports that the benefits of an EMS include a 252% increase in connections made, a 226% increase in sessions joined and 629% increase in meetings booked when comparing events that use an EMS and those that don’t.
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According to Connectiv CEO Jay Weintraub, the company built its own EMS to have a tool that helped the team operate efficiently and create experiences that set its events apart.
“We want and expect our technology to help us make more money, but revenue for us is the result of solving a problem preventing others from the experience they want,” Weintraub stated. “Our partnership with Grip began four years ago, and our teams have built deep integrations together. This partnership has certainly aided our industry leading NPS scores and helped our shows during and post acquisition.”
Grip, which wanted the best solution possible for conference, trade show and confex event organizers, found Connectiv’s EMS — built for event professionals by event professionals — was a perfect fit.
“Rather than build it [the EMS] ourselves over the course of 36-plus months, we decided to find a suite of products that were already solving these problems right now,” Groot said. “That led us to start discussions with Connectiv, which uses these tools on a daily basis to successfully solve its own event management problems at scale.”
Grip allows customers to choose to either use its full suites of tools or to select what features they want and need, meaning organizers can integrate Grip features into their existing registration and event management products and tech stacks.
Groot said there are two things that really excite him about this deal.
“First, these products become a ‘force multiplier’ for Grip. Products like Event Registration allow us to get more accurate data into our system, which has knock-on effects for the whole participant experience, like meetings and matchmaking. When better data is combined with world-class matchmaking, amazing things happen! Second, I’m excited to see the overwhelming demand for these new products,” Groot said. “I wasn’t expecting so many big deals so quickly. Now the announcement has happened, I’ve also been surprised by the large number of meetings already scheduled with customers. They’ve indicated that they’re keen to use our new products as a way to increase revenue, which is exactly what we wanted to achieve with this acquisition.”
