Naboo Leans Into AI, Aggressive Pricing in Bid to Disrupt M&E

Naboo founder and CEO Maxime Eduardo talks

• Pricing and commercial models
• Who in the enterprise the tool is meant to please
• The advantage of AI
• Expansion into new markets

Event tech start-up Naboo turned heads in February after raising $70 million in Series B funding that the Paris-based company said would fuel a “new growth phase” with further investments in its agentic AI capabilities as well as a planned expansion into the US. 

The AI-powered event platform provides venue sourcing, event planning and centralised payment tools for enterprise clients including BCG, Capgemini, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. But Naboo co-founder and CEO Maxime Eduardo insists “we are a procurement company—not an event company”.

“Our strategy is to build an enterprise software for procurement. It's not to build an event software for anyone to use. We're building software for procurement [teams] to build large-scale M&E programmes. So, we are extremely enterprise oriented,” he said in a recent interview with BTN executive editor Lauren Arena. 

But that wasn’t always the case. Founded in 2022, Naboo started as an online venue marketplace for internal meetings and corporate retreats in the French countryside. Its scaling strategy focused on small and midsize companies before it acquired boutique events agency BizMeeting in 2024 – along with major clients such as Veolia and French multinational bank Société Générale – and shifted focus to large enterprises that typically run a high volume of small, simple meetings that fall beyond the scope of an existing M&E programme.

A €20 million Series A funding round in 2024 led by Notion Capital helped to refine the strategy of “selling to procurement”, Eduardo said. Now with offices in Paris, Barcelona, Hamburg, London, Montreal and most recently New York, Naboo’s latest funding boost, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (which is also a long-time investor in Navan) will help to “rapidly scale” its US go-to-market strategy.

Eduardo detailed Naboo’s expansion plans with BTN Europe and why the start-up’s unique commercial model makes it a “no-brainer” for procurement teams. An edited transcript follows.

BTN Europe: Congratulations on your recent $70 million Series B funding round. Talk us through your growth strategy moving forward, especially since you’re now offering some of Naboo’s internal AI tools to end users.

Maxime Eduardo: Our clients were pushing us to go global in 2025, so we opened offices in Spain, Italy, Portugal, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. After six months of going international, half of our revenues were from international business. Since raising another funding round with Lightspeed we are expanding to the US, Canada, Mexico and Asia, and can turbocharge our software with artificial intelligence. We opened an office in the US six months ago, and it's now 20 per cent of our revenues.

We launched in Dubai six months ago and that was our way into Asia. We had significant activity in the Middle East with customers in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Turkey. And in February, it all collapsed. There are no more events in the Middle East… I strongly hope that the Iran war will end in the coming weeks or days, but if it does not, we will still open in Singapore in September. We have to be there. It’s just taking more time than expected because of the war.

BTN Europe: In a recent interview with your new investor Lightspeed, you mentioned that Naboo is taking business away from some very big legacy players in the corporate travel management and M&E space. You specifically named Amex GBT and BCD Travel – stating “they haven't made the appropriate investments in AI capabilities” and that they’re “stuck” focusing on their core business – travel management – rather than meetings and events. Both Amex GBT and BCD travel have dedicated meetings and events divisions, which, like Naboo, look to consolidate M&E spend. Strategic meetings management may not be as mature as travel management, but these TMCs have been doing this work for many, many years. Why does Naboo stand out against these legacy players?

Eduardo: Thank you for asking the question. You’re right. I said it and I strongly believe there is a common misconception around the fact that business travel and M&E are similar because they're not. Corporate travel management doesn't work on quotes. M&E works on quotes. That's a major difference. The second thing is, customers in business travel are very mature and they negotiate their own corporate rates with major hotel chains and airlines. This does not exist in M&E because individual rates do not apply for group rates. 

And by the way, corporates don't want instant book capabilities [for meetings and events]. They want to negotiate. They want quotes, and they’ll organise an RFP for every single event because they want the best price, because they want savings. So, they're not pushing for instantaneity, at least not for bigger, more complex events. They're pushing to negotiate more. They're pushing to yield savings, to have the best price, but not to have instantaneity on the booking. 

Traditional legacy software cannot answer this, because if it's on quote, it means there is a service element. This involves vendor negotiation; it involves discussion and a workflow. At Amex GBT or BCD this service element is done by humans. But the thing is, all of this can now be managed by AI agents. And that’s the case with Naboo. This is why our software is so much better. And this is also why we're so much cheaper because we don't have humans doing the job, we have AI agents doing the job.

We also share our revenues with our clients because our cost base has decreased so much. In just a year, we've increased productivity in our teams by 150 per cent thanks to AI. So, a human agent managing 100 customers can now manage 250 with the same quality of service. These numbers are what we shared when we were audited by Lightspeed. This is the reason why they invested in us. And they invested heavily because they saw, in the numbers, that the productivity gains are massive. And the thing is, we are now sharing these gains with our clients.

BTN Europe: How exactly does that translate for corporate clients?

Eduardo: We can be cheaper. Our management fees for customers are approximately 80 per cent cheaper than Amex [GBT] and BCD. And that's also how we’ve won large-scale clients like AXA. They took the risk going with a start-up because the user experience was much better, but also the price is much cheaper. So, that's management fees, but then there's also commissions [from suppliers on the Naboo platform]. We now have contracts with some large corporates where we share our commissions with them.

BTN Europe: Talk me through your strategy. Why share commissions when management fees are already, as you say, much cheaper than other more established players?

Eduardo: Since we have a cost structure that is much more efficient, we can allow ourselves to get less revenues and still have a very profitable model. Also, we are in conquest mode right now, so we have to be aggressive. We have to be a no-brainer.

When we talk to the likes of Meta, Google, Microsoft, Siemens or Allianz, we have to demonstrate immediately what's at stake: efficiency, user expense and money. And in all three areas, we have to be much better. If that means we share our commissions with clients so that they're actually making profits by working with Naboo, we're doing it. …I cannot go into all the details, but now corporate customers like AXA, Siemens, Veolia, Société Générale and Capgemini are making profits for procurement with our software.

BTN Europe: What’s your take on new entrants like Navan, which recently integrated AI-powered event planning platform BoomPop into its Meetings & Events offering?

Eduardo: We have a common shareholder with Navan, but we don’t have a relationship with Navan. I don't admire a lot of our digital competitors, but I do admire BoomPop. It's a very good solution, but they don’t sell to procurement. BoomPop is selling to SMEs and that's why they married with Navan.

We're building software for procurement to build large-scale M&E programmes. So, we are extremely enterprise oriented. And so, we cannot work with Navan or with BoomPop because we don't sell to the same people

BTN Europe: Let’s talk more about your software. Specifically, your AI planner. You mentioned previously that 90 per cent of users are now using the AI planner instead of traditional search.

Eduardo: Approximately 70 per cent of the events procured through our platform are less than $3K each. So, the individual value of an event is extremely small. The work our [human] advisors were doing on these deals was largely transactional. The element of advice was limited. 

AI agents are much faster and much more reliable than any human when it comes to refining a brief, sourcing, supplier negotiation and even contract signing and payment. For sourcing, our AI agents scroll the web – TripAdvisor, Cvent, Google Maps, websites, etc. – combining semantic analysis and photo analysis to identify the best venues to match our customers' requirements. If the client agrees with the recommendations, voice agents will then call the venue and request quotes.

The AI agent behaves like a human because it's been trained on thousands of events that we've done in the past. We've analysed all our emails, all our calls, all the loops of how we work with clients, so that now it does the job better than any human.

Once we receive the quotes, the AI crosschecks the T&Cs against the client’s corporate policies, checking if anything is missing and, if needed, will ask the venue for clarifications. In our back office, AI agents also perform price analysis on quotes based on data we have on seasonality and will negotiate with the venue on every single item. The final quote is then pushed to the client. If they decide to accept the quote, the AI agent will analyse payment conditions and process the payment accordingly.

LLM interaction with clients is currently chat based but we are developing a voice agent. We’re also working with Capgemini to develop an integration with Microsoft Teams. 

We’re pushing AI, but our clients always have the choice to speak to a human agent. 

BTN Europe: Is Naboo focused squarely on those small, high-volume meetings or are you also going after larger, more complex events?

Eduardo: Our entry door to procurement is to manage the tail spend [of meetings]. However, our large enterprise clients usually give us 100 per cent of the category, not just the tail. They also ask us to get involved in events above a certain spend threshold, usually $100K or $200K per event. That said, the largest event we have produced so far was a five-day offsite for 1,000 participants with a budget of $5 million. We do two to three large-scale events (exceeding $1 million in spend) every month.

BTN Europe: Cvent is a dominant player in the M&E space and has spent decades negotiating with hotels and venues to build their marketplace. How has Naboo done that? How do your AI agents source venues?  

Eduardo: It's a critical, never-ending piece of work. AI helps a lot in sourcing a massive number of venues in very specific areas. We have AI agents working all day long crawling the web and identifying venues that are consistent with what our customers are sourcing through the AI planner. If we don’t have the right venue in our inventory, the AI just sources from the web. Then our partnership teams get involved and call the venues that we need. We have different types of vendors on the platform: some we only have the right to distribute; we also have key partners [where we have] a proper commission and contract negotiation. The latter includes big hotel chains like Accor, Hilton and Marriott, where we offer very premium support through our partnership team. This equates to about 10 per cent of vendors, so we really segment the supply, and we spend our energy where we make revenues.

BTN Europe: And there's no concern from your corporate clients that AI is sourcing venues from the web?

Eduardo: We never contract with a vendor before they have uploaded all the necessary compliance documents to our platform. We do the compliance checks, whatever happens. Then there's quality. Our AI agent filters and cross checks each venue based on different sources of information – TripAdvisor, the Fork, Google Maps, Booking.com – as well as ratings online. So, we analyse all this structured and unstructured data on the web to curate our collection. 

BTN Europe: And within that curated collection there's the 10 per cent of venues that are contracted with Naboo, where the company receives commissions. Do these venues receive preferential treatment in the platform?

Eduardo: Yes. And clients love it because it's a cheaper rate. If clients have their own negotiated rates with some vendors, then we apply the rates of our customers.

BTN Europe: Shifting gears slightly. Naboo recently appointed a head of AI tooling, and you’ve linked AI use to the career development of Naboo employees. How are you equipping staff with AI tools? Tell me about the AI culture within the company.

Eduardo: Indeed, we have a head of AI tooling who is equipping our colleagues and training them. He is up to date on most AI innovations, frontier models, and therefore can prioritise how to equip and train our teams. Everyone in our organisation is actively using AI on a daily basis [the average age of Naboo employees is 28 years old].

There is now an AI business case attached to 100 per cent of our recruitment. Believe me, this is a massive rejection criteria. Also, when managers want to hire anyone, they have to demonstrate that AI cannot do the job, otherwise the position is not opened by HR. 

BTN Europe: And when it comes to hiring new talent, what skills or capabilities are you most keen to build?

Eduardo: AI engineers and data scientists. These are the most important talents for what we are building. Agentic systems need incredible amounts of high-quality data. Also, more sales people across all our global offices.

BTN Europe: What does success look like for Naboo in the next two to three years?

Eduardo: Powering more than $1 billion in meetings and events spend through Naboo's agentic system and adding new procurement categories – beyond M&E – to our platform. These will likely include tail spend across marketing and HR. We’re also looking to become truly global and open offices across APAC, LATAM and Africa.