Cvent's McNeel Keenan
Cvent made headlines in December with the acquisition of virtual conferencing platforms Goldcast and ON24 in separate transactions jointly valued at approximately $700 million.
With in-person events now backed by rising budgets and increased optimism among meetings professionals, some questioned the hefty investment in virtual event tools.
But for Cvent's SVP of product management, McNeel Keenan, the dual acquisitions were simply "a continuation of our existing strategy and how our customers are already using the Cvent platform."
"We're still seeing year-over-year growth in virtual event usage," he said. "Customers are still demonstrating a lot of demand to run virtual events to keep audiences engaged between in-person events and to run an online platform."
Even with the aggressive return to in-person events in recent years, Keenan said the Virginia-based event tech company "continued to invest" in virtual event and webinar delivery.
That investment began with arms-length partnerships during the pandemic and included a 2021 SPAC merger that led the company to go public for a second time, with remote conferencing giant Zoom as an initial investor.
Cvent also partnered with Zoom to incorporate several of its products—Zoom Meetings, Zoom Webinars and Zoom Events, the latter targeting hybrid meetings—into its platform.
Since then, Cvent has built its own proprietary technology to power webinars and virtual events. Keenan said 25 percent of Cvent's event registration tools are "still being used" for virtual—and the company expects its latest acquisitions to boost its digital engagement capabilities with 'AI-powered' workflows.
What happens to the Zoom relationship now?
"Zoom is still available in a limited way as part of our offerings, but it hasn't been the backbone of our [virtual event] offering for a few years," Keenan explained.
"Zoom Events is [now] a direct competitor to what we're doing, especially with these acquisitions. They are a material player in that space and will continue to be. … There's definitely some 'co-opetition' going on here."
End-to-End Engagement
The Goldcast deal, reportedly worth $300 million, brings AI-first video management capabilities into Cvent, allowing users to self-serve with editing tools that can repurpose long-form webinar content into digital marketing assets.
For Keenan, Goldcast's primary value proposition isn't just in running webinars but also is in helping event marketers manage recorded video content after a webinar ends, something he described as a major "pain point."
"Content created from events and webinars should be leveraged much more by our customers, and the more innovative ones are leaning into that," he said. "That's what builds a more reliable audience to tap into to build a bigger audience at your next in-person event."
While clients in the media and tech verticals are among those "leaning in" to this approach, Keenan admitted "there are certainly challenges with some of the more higher-compliance verticals. … Compliance is a headwind."
Even so, Cvent will continue to invest in Goldcast as a standalone product, Keenan said, while also introducing the functionality into the core Cvent platform "for a unified experience with data, workflow integrations [and] user management."
ON24, meanwhile, touts itself as an AI-powered webinar and engagement platform for B-to-B enterprise sales and marketing.
Keenan did not disclose details on the company's plans for ON24. (The $400 million all-cash deal is pending regulatory approval and Cvent expects it to close in the first half of 2026.) The dual acquisitions, however, suggest a push to add functionality that extends beyond meetings and event planning, with a sharpened focus on marketing automation and lead generation.
"ON24 has done a really good job about thinking of that post-webinar activation experience—that's the kind of stuff marketers care about," Keenan said.
Brad Gillespie, a former Cvent executive and founder of consultancy The Method Project, said the Goldcast and ON24 deals signal a shift in Cvent's approach to M&A.
"Pre-pandemic, the pattern was pretty clear. It was really about taking market share by acquiring organizations that did not necessarily represent a new capability, but more of a competitor and, over time, migrate those users onto the Cvent product," he said.
Post-pandemic, and with these latest acquisitions, in some ways that pattern remains, particularly with ON24.
"There's not much difference between what ON24 provides and what Cvent provides," Gillespie said. "What will be interesting is Goldcast, because on both the planner and the attendee side it does offer a superior user experience. Will Cvent decide to keep Goldcast as its new standard for webinar and virtual event experience rather than moving customers into its own product? Will it start to move customers to the Goldcast capability? I could see that playing out."
Investing in AI
Since January 2024, Cvent has made seven acquisitions that place it at the convergence of event management and event marketing, with AI baked in. This includes the addition of group meeting scheduling tool Jifflenow and lead-capture solution iCapture in January 2024, AI-powered vendor sourcing tool Reposite in June 2024 and event marketing technology Splash in September 2024. Its acquisition of event floorplan designer Prismm, formerly Allseated, followed in April 2025, ahead of its comprehensive rollout of CventIQ, which layers AI across the whole platform.
"Our strategy is to deliver a single platform, unified data, visibility, integrations, user experience, security and governance," Keenan said. "We've invested heavily both in organic build and M&A … to nail that total event marketing program. There's a lot of investment we're going to make to ensure this all comes together as one platform, and we're excited to showcase how that's going to happen at Cvent Connect [in July]. We'll be able to bring together a lot of pieces that are already there."
He also hinted that CventIQ is about to play a bigger role in removing friction from the supplier marketplace, and that AI soon will help drive collaboration between meeting planners and their venue and vendor partners.
Even as big tech and platform players—the likes of Microsoft, ServiceNow and Salesforce—expand into meeting workflows with their respective AI tools, Keenan is confident that Cvent's foundations in meetings management will give it an advantage.
"It's really tough [for corporates] to try to build something on a more general-purpose platform, [because] when it comes to the guts of running an event, outside of approving an event, there's a lot of specialization required to actually nail the experience," Keenan said. "We think that will be an enduring value proposition for Cvent. We're going to be able to continue helping our customers get the most out of their data and AI by being a purpose-built event management platform."
From Gillespie's point of view, the meetings technology landscape is "ripe for disruption", with AI native companies expected to outpace incumbents that are "bolting on" AI to a legacy technology stack.
"Cvent holds this incredible position in terms of market share—10x or more of the next true alternative. No other organization has really achieved scale," Gillespie said. "What kind of organization stands the chance to challenge an incumbent like that? It's going to have to be something fundamentally different, and that's really the opportunity of an AI native entrant … reimagining what both the planner/marketer experience as well as the attendee experience could be.
"The bolt-on strategy will be felt at a certain layer, but it will never achieve what's possible when you can go as deeply into that AI stack as an AI-native organization, building from the ground up," Gillespie continued.
Gillespie said he expects to see more AI-native players, the likes of Nowadays and Boompop, join the meetings tech sector within the next 12 months.
"We will see new companies enter the space, looking at this massive industry and the problems that exist, and find ways to bring innovation to the table," he said.
Confronted with the prospect of big tech getting into the meetings game, Keenan said he wasn't too concerned.
"Where people are getting the most value from AI is looking to existing partners because they're able to most rapidly incorporate it into existing workflows, into existing tools, into existing data," he said.